I work at a university and our GIS department uses epiphany to display maps and videos on a large TV screen. They have a basic html web app that cycles through various files in a slideshow. Prior to a few months ago on Fedora 41, .mp4 (H.265) files were able to be played both directly by epiphany and embedded in a page with gstreamer plugins installed. The system crashed and I had to rebuild and I’ve been trying for weeks to get the web app working properly again. I’ve tried with both nouveau and nvidia drivers, hardware accelerated and software only, but can’t get it working again. I can play the files in totem/videos with no issues. I’ve also reproduced the behavior in VMs running Fedora 41 and 42. I’m fairly certain this is either a epiphany bug or a conscious change. Firefox/mmpeg works flawlessly, but the overall app doesn’t function the same in FF. As a sanity check, can anyone confirm if they are able to play a H.265/.mp4 file directly with epiphany? Here is a link to my test file:
Looks like this may be a known/reported issue: local video files (in file://) don't play (#2654) · Issues · GNOME / Epiphany · GitLab
Why do you use Epiphany?
If it’s for the design, Firefox Gnome Theme might interest you:
I’ll definitely give this a try. Due to the way the webapp works, I’m not sure that this will be a viable solution but will check with the developer. It’s basically a slideshow with selectable elements that has a banner overlay. It’s used to cycle between drone footage and scans of old maps. Thank you for the suggestion though!
Wait, you said “web application”?
A PWA?
Not a PWA – it’s basically digital signage that uses some JS/Python to display different things on a webpage.
At worst, try a chromium browser like Brave (which is pretty much de-googhelled).
Official installer:
curl -fsS https://dl.brave.com/install.sh | sh
Flathub flatpak:
flatpak install flathub com.brave.Browser