gstreamer-vaapi + nvidia driver causes firefox to crash on animated gifs / video tags

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Hi Christopher,

Would love to open up an apport-created bug for this, but I don't get anything in /var/crash when firefox crashes, or get any apport dialogs (i do get them for other apps). I do get the mozilla crashreporter to show up, and i've used that to "submit a bugreport" many times, but don't know where it gets sent to.

Joe Barnett, fair enough. It would appear Firefox is a one-off exception to this. Hence, could you please provide the stack trace ID URLs as per https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Bugs?action=show&redirect=DebuggingFirefox#Submitting_Crashes_to_Mozilla ?

As well, could you please provide the specific URL with animated gifs that demonstrate this issue?

Cut from Bug Description.

Joe Barnett, you don't need to file a new report, or do any further apport-collect'ing at this point, unless someone specifically asks. What is still needed though is an example URL that demonstrates this problem.

trying to seek in http://media02.nfl.info/NFL/Media/2014/Video14/Officiating_Media_Video_11-26-14.mp4 causes the crash 100% for me with gstreamer-vaapi installed. scrolling through animated gifs on deadspin.com articles is not quite 100%, but happens often.

Joe Barnett, when I went to the advised link via Firefox after installing the package gstreamer1.0-vaapi (no additional entries were seen in Firefox > Add-ons > plugins) it noted:
Video can't be played because the file is corrupt.

However, if I open it in Chrome, the video does work.

Hence, could you please advise which package precisely to install in order to test to this issue?

lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS
Release: 14.04

apt-cache policy firefox
firefox:
  Installed: 34.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1
  Candidate: 34.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1
  Version table:
 *** 34.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-security/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     28.0+build2-0ubuntu2 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages

apt-cache policy gstreamer1.0-vaapi
gstreamer1.0-vaapi:
  Installed: 0.5.7-0ubuntu4
  Candidate: 0.5.7-0ubuntu4
  Version table:
 *** 0.5.7-0ubuntu4 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

you can also try http://media02.nfl.info/NFL/Media/2014/Video15/Officiating_Media_Video_12-05-14.mp4 if that works better -- not sure why it would say file is corrupt, as you saw with chrome it clearly isn't...

here are related packages i have installed when it crashes:

libvdpau1:amd64 0.7-2
vdpau-va-driver:amd64 0.7.4-3
libva-drm1:amd64 1.3.1-3
libva-glx1:amd64 1.3.1-3
libva-wayland1:amd64 1.3.1-3
libva-x11-1:amd64 1.3.1-3
libva1:amd64 1.3.1-3
libgstreamer-vaapi1.0-0:amd64 0.5.9-2
gstreamer1.0-vaapi:amd64 0.5.9-2
firefox 34.0+build2-0ubuntu0
nvidia-331-updates 331.89-0ubuntu5
nvidia-331-updates-uvm 331.89-0ubuntu5
nvidia-cg-toolkit 3.1.0013-1
 nvidia-libopencl1-331-updates 331.89-0ubuntu5
nvidia-opencl-icd-331-updates 331.89-0ubuntu5
nvidia-settings 331.20-0ubuntu8

removal of gstreamer1.0-vaapi also removes libgstreamer-vaapi1.0-0 and libva-glx1, after which firefox is able to successfully play and seek within the video without crashing.

Joe Barnett, it may be the reason I can't reproduce is I have different extensions and plugins installed then you that cause the plugin to not work. Unfortunately, I'm at a loss as to what precisely is causing my not being able to view the video.

The same issue occurs with the AMD catalyst drivers, so it's not related to just NVIDIA. I'm using Catalyst 14.12.
Starting to play a HTML5 video will instantly crash the browser, no need to seek.

Upstream bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=894372

This bug should be closed because Firefox doesn't use gstreamer anymore, see last comment at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=894372

Mantas Kriaučiūnas, the package gstreamer-vaapi is still available in latest Ubuntu. Also, upstream report notes folks who desire gstream-vaapi with Firefox in select use cases.

Given this report is scoped to the package gstreamer-vaapi crashing when in use, and not firefox support of gstreamer-vaapi, I don't see a problem with leaving this report open until issue is resolved for the original reporter, or issue tested resolved.