Clear Linux Firefox Video Codec Support

My children both have Dell Latitude laptops, picked up second hand from Ebay, running Clear Linux. As part of current remote schooling requirements my daughter was asked to study a Maths video hosted on Vimeo. Unfortunately despite Youtube working without issue, Firefox complained that Vimeo videos were corrupted and refused to attempt playback.

One solution was to install FFmpeg (which provides codecs) from a 3rd-party bundle and update the Firefox configuration to look for the newly installed codecs. This approach does add a dependency on a 3rd-party which is not ideal. I may look at building FFmpeg myself and hosting the bundle as a self maintained 3rd-party repository.

Steps

• Add the third-party repo:

sudo swupd 3rd-party add greginator https://clear.greginator.xyz/

• Install FFmpeg:

sudo swupd 3rd-party bundle-add ffmpeg

• Add FFmpeg libraries to the paths checked when starting Firefox:

echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/3rd-party/bundles/greginator/usr/lib64:/opt/3rd-party/bundles/greginator/usr/lib32" >> ${HOME}/.config/firefox.conf