Some videos won't play, missing codec?

[ravilov]

It gets as far as showing the thumbnail/description/comments screen. But when I tap on the video, it just shows the loading spinner forever. This happens consistently on Android 4.4 but seems to work on Android 7.1. Maybe a missing system codec on older Android versions? Any way to remedy this, or at least detect this condition and show a warning?

Examples:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p1wmOIPNfg
• almost all videos from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYgagfPRvQo4sQUAm4SLAnA

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[theScrabi]

Can't be, the video would fail to be displayed and end up with an exception if no supported codec was supplied.

[ravilov]

Any other ideas for this strange behavior? Is it perhaps possible an exception does indeed happen but ends up suppressed (via an empty catch block or similar), or just sent to logcat, or otherwise kept from reaching the player?

[theScrabi]

It could be your android system.

[mozbugbox]

It could be the hardware video decoder that cannot handle the video steam properly. Particularly when playing the webm format.

Try test it by setup NewPipe to play with external player and has the external player (VLC, MX player) plays online stream videos using soft video decoder.

[ravilov]

Made some interesting discoveries.

I installed MX Player as suggested and set NewPipe to use external player. Videos that work normally in NP work just fine in MX as well, and videos that don't work in NP don't work in MX either. MX just goes through available codec categories (SW, HW, HW+) and finally displays "Cannot play this link".

Then I thought of something. My default resolution in NP is set to 480p. Just for testing I changed it to 720p. Suddenly all the videos work, both in NP and MX.

Not sure what to make of that. Still think there must be a better way to handle not being able to play a video instead of just showing the loading spinner forever. I'm leaving my default at 720p for now at least.

[theScrabi]

Ah that was the missing part. Yes 420p also failes on my device.

[ghost]

same problem.
when i select 480p as quality it is loading take too much time . at the this point 720p loading in shorter time than 480p. my network easily play 720p videos, so it's not network problem

[alexandrezia]

Have this issue too, android 4.4 (honda civic head unity)

[Stypox]

#2415 is probably related

[Stypox]

Duplicate of #2415