Waterfox's ffmpeg support

Sometime in the past months, I realized that I couldn't reliably watch videos anymore. That wasn't much of a problem because I mostly consume videos on my phone, not on my laptop. YouTube worked fine, but on others the stream would either break down when skipping or not work at all.

Searching the web revealed the cause to be that Waterfox does not support ffmpeg v8, which Arch Linux ships nowadays. There is a bug report requesting to backport support for ffmpeg 8, but it's not exactly quite active.

To resolve the issue, I had to install ffmpeg7.1 from the AUR in addition to ffmpeg v8.

For some reason, one of the b2sums in the PKGBUILD did not match. I verified the file contents manually and updated the sum. Though, that seem to happen only when installing via aura. Weird.

        curl https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-devel.asc | gpg --import
        curl https://ffmpeg.org/git-tag-key.asc | gpg --import
        git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/ffmpeg7.1.git
        cd ffmpeg7.1/
        makepkg
        sudo pacman -U ffmpeg7.1-7.1.3-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
    

By accessing about:support and scrolling to the 'Media' section, one can see which codecs are supported. H264, HEVC, Theora, and ACC support were missing before. Only Theora is missing afterward, which is expected as Theora support is experimental and behind a config as of 6.6.9.

Update 31. March 2026: ffmpeg7.1 & libvpx

When updating my system today, pacman complained because of ffmpeg7.1. It is no longer compatible to the latest libvpx. The bug report hasn't moved forward either, so this workaround has to be fixed.

:: installing libvpx (1.16.0-3) breaks dependency 'libvpx.so=11-64' required by ffmpeg7.1

Luckily, it's enough to rebuild the ffmpeg package.