Vivaldi - black screen for videos and Web WhatsApp (among others)
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Hi all. I'm not entirely sure when the issue appeared for me, but it was definitely in December 2017. I cannot play any video from YouTube and other websites (which would suggest a codec issue) but I also cannot access, for example, web.whatswapp.com. I'm running Vivaldi on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The problem persists even after reinstalling Vivaldi (!). For reference, everything works just fine in Chrome and Firefox.
I would greatly appreciate some hints as I haven't managed to figure it out by myself yet...
Edit: trying to open https://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html also results in a black screen.
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Hi @slazien , are you sure you type the correct link? Actually you type a wrong one (assuming is the same that you post above). Correct one is: https://web.whatsapp.com/
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All videos still play just fine for me... Netflix, embedded Flash, YouTube, https://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html ... So it seems like you have a local problem to track down, given obviously it's not a generic Linux V fault.
The very obvious initial troubleshooting question has to be: what happens when you test with a CLEAN PROFILE?
Note: In your "The problem persists even after reinstalling Vivaldi (!).", i intuit from your gratuitously appended exclamation mark that you seem to think that was an important diagnostic step. In fact pgm reinstallation rarely fixes anything in Linux, unless you also explicitly deleted / moved / renamed the associated ~/.config directory, ie, your Vivaldi "Default" directory. Eg, mine = /home/steffie/.config/vivaldi-snapshot/Default
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@marko-indaco Hi Marco! I didn't notice the mistake, I was of course typing in the correct address. Thanks for pointing out.
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@steffie Yes, I thought so, having been accustomed to Windows for the most of my life hasn't helped much haha. I will try your suggestion and report back.
EDIT: tried starting out with a clean profile by renaming the "Default" folder in my ~/.config/vivaldi/ directory. Didn't help either which even more strongly suggests, as you said, a local issue. Given that information, do you have any suggestions on what to try out next to fix the issue?
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@slazien Well, i'm honestly a bit surprised that the clean profile also failed, coz your initial:
"the issue appeared for me, but it was definitely in December 2017"
implied to me that pre-Dec all videos played fine, which if true then implies that all your codecs were installed & operational... which if true would beg the question "why/how could said codecs simply fail in Dec?". It seemed to me more probable that instead your Default directory had suffered one or more files being corrupted. However it seems you've now eliminated that, so it's back to the codecs.Have you done what Gwen-Dragon recommended?
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@steffie Yeah, I did it and the codecs were already installed. Even though everything points to a local issue, I have some doubt since on Chrome everything works just fine.
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@slazien Hmmm, well i must say that i'm now at a loss. This is pretty craven of me, but finally i'm wondering if there's something unique about Ubuntu 16.04 LTS [& what DE?] that adversely impacts Vivaldi. I hope that another V user, also with the same distro, might happen by & comment. Sorry that i've been useless.
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Just a quick update if anyone's curious. After updating the browser today via apt-get the issue seems to have disappeared and everything's working just fine. This makes it even more mysterious...
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@slazien OMZ, now the conundrum gets wrapped in an enigma!
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