GeopJr
[Bug]: Video does not preview in media tab when posting.
Describe the bug
When adding video to the media tab, you just see a grey rectangle. You can post, and the video will play in the post, but not in the preview.
It's interesting to observe that VLC actually fails to play the video as well with the error message displayed below, but whatever built in video player that's in vanilla Gnome these days is able to play it. (The video is a raw output straight from Blender.)
Steps To Reproduce
- Not sure if Mastodon re-encodes it, but you can try the video from here: https://oldbytes.space/@eobet/112568134625001023
- Attach H264 video in an MP4 container to a post and observe the lack of preview in the media tab.
Logs and/or Screenshots
Instance Backend
glitch-soc
Operating System
Nobara (Fedora 39 w Gnome/Wayland)
Package
Flatpak
Troubleshooting information
os: GNOME 46 (Flatpak runtime) prefix: /app flatpak: true version: 0.7.2 (production) gtk: 4.14.4 (4.14.1) libadwaita: 1.5.1 (1.5.0) libsoup: 3.4.4 (3.4.4) libgtksourceview: 5.12.0 (5.12.0)
Additional Context
No response
When you click on a video in the composer's media tab, it will ask your distro to open it in the default app - that's because Tuba's media viewer won't be intractable while the composer is open.
I'm having a bit of trouble understanding what the issue is exactly, is it:
- The composer media tab not displaying thumbnails for video attachments?
- The default distro app for videos (in your case VLC), not being able to play the video?
For the first one, I'll see what I can do about it but it'd probably require adding a thumbnailer since videos don't have embeded thumbnails
For the second one, you are probably missing the needed codecs for VLC, while the GNOME video app you tested was probably from flatpak, which includes the codecs. Long story short, in case you aren't aware of it already, some codecs require a paid license to be shipped. Fedora and OpenSUSE, as far as I remember, don't include them by default. I don't know about Nobara.
I just discovered that while a video is not visible when you add it to a post, it does become visible when you are entering alt text...
In 0.9 the alt text dialog can preview images and videos. About your initial issue, I guess we can use Video widgets instead of thumbnailers for the new composer