Can not play live Facebook videos, others play fine

Users and developers helping users with generic and technical Pale Moon issues on all operating systems.

Moderator: trava90

Forum rules
This board is for technical/general usage questions and troubleshooting for the Pale Moon browser only.
Technical issues and questions not related to the Pale Moon browser should be posted in other boards!
Please keep off-topic and general discussion out of this board, thank you!
tdd37

Can not play live Facebook videos, others play fine

Unread post by tdd37 » 2017-09-14, 22:37

I'm testing out Pale Moon on Linux, because it will apparently be the only sane, normal browser like the browsers I've used for the past 20+ years after Firefox turns to a steaming pile of crap with version 57.

The only show-stopper that I have found is that live Facebook videos will not play. I can see a still frame before I click to play, and after I click, I immediately get the generic "Something went wrong" message overlaying the video. Sometimes, instead, I get just a black box with no video controls (seek bar, play/pause button, etc.)

This is happening on Linux Mint 18 (Ubuntu 16.04 based) and Gallium OS 2.1 (also Ubuntu 16.04). I tried both Steve Pusser's and Laszlo Kovac's builds, with the same result. I also tried the installer version, same result. Then I tried the beta/unstable version, same result.

Non-live Facebook videos work, both YouTube live and pre-recorded videos work, and both Twitch.tv live and pre-recorded streams work.

Walter Dnes
Astronaut
Astronaut
Posts: 650
Joined: 2015-07-30, 20:29
Location: Vaughan, ON, Canada

Re: Can not play live Facebook videos, others play fine

Unread post by Walter Dnes » 2017-09-15, 08:29

This is a longshot, but it helped another user with problems with Twitter. The unstable build has a string in about:config, named... general.useragent.override.facebook.com
The unstable version will have a value something like Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:3.2) Goanna/20170101 PaleMoon/27.5.0a1 Make a copy of the string value in case things go wrong (right-click enables copy-to-clipboard).

Replace the string value with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0 and restart Pale Moon. Try Facebook again.
There's a right way
There's a wrong way
And then there's my way

User avatar
trava90
Contributing developer
Contributing developer
Posts: 1736
Joined: 2013-05-20, 18:19
Location: Somewhere in Sector 001

Re: Can not play live Facebook videos, others play fine

Unread post by trava90 » 2017-09-15, 12:12

Also try disabling MSE and see if that allows the Facebook Live video to play.

tdd37

Re: Can not play live Facebook videos, others play fine

Unread post by tdd37 » 2017-09-15, 17:21

I probably should have mentioned that I tried both of those. :) No change when disabling MSE.

Changing the useragent for facebook.com and fbcdn.com to different values never made it work, but some values make it fail with "something went wrong", and other values made it fail with black screen. (The stable version also has useragent override settings, and you don't have to restart for them to take effect.)

I also just downloaded the latest Pale Moon to a Win7 laptop, and live videos aren't playing on it, either.

Here are live streams on Facebook, if anyone wants to test: https://www.facebook.com/live

tdd37

Re: Can not play live Facebook videos, others play fine

Unread post by tdd37 » 2017-09-15, 17:30

Disregard above, I've found something that sort of works. Let me do some more testing and get back.

tdd37

Re: Can not play live Facebook videos, others play fine

Unread post by tdd37 » 2017-09-15, 17:52

The following settings get some live videos to work. The remaining videos show a recent still frame with no error message. I've found that with the non-playing videos, if I switch away from the video and switch right back (using the previous/next left/right gadgets on the sides of the video), it sometimes kickstarts it into playing.

general.useragent.override.facebook.com = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.9) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.9
general.useragent.override.fbcdn.net = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.9) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.9

ENABLE - Enable Media Source Extensions (MSE)
DISABLE - Use MSE asynchronously
ENABLE - Enable MSE for MP4 video
ENABLE - Enable MSE for WebM video

Locked