The media couldn't be loaded error

After an upgrade or an installation from scratch, we might notice a weird behavior while navigating among the streaming websites: some videos play well, others raise an error like:

The media couldn’t be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported

Browser error or system error

This message is a little misleading and brings us to believe that the internet connection or the website itself has a sort of internal error.

Being other videos in the same network working flawlessly, excludes any hypothesis against it, and it’s not even a matter of the browser. Whatever browser used to play that video, the result is the same.

It doesn’t depend on the browser or the network, so the problem must be in the software codecs.

Packman repository on the rescue

All the openSUSE users know that for licensing reasons, not all codecs can be included in the packages provided by the standard repositories, that’s why it is almost mandatory to add the external repo Packman in our list:

$ sudo zypper ar 'http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/packman/suse/openSUSE_Leap_$releasever/' Packman

Of course, the fact that it is already in our repo list doesn’t mean everything should work as expected.

We must instruct our system to gather there all the needed media packages.

Update from Yast

One of the common mistakes is to consider these steps acquired after an upgrade from zypper. What happens instead, is that the changes applied might get partially lost, and some multimedia packages are installed from the OSS repo.

To check the real situation we should launch the Yast Software Manager, switch to the Repositories tab, and select the Packman repository

As you can see, there is an active label just underneath the tab which invites you to switch to the system packages to that repo.

After clicking on it Yast makes its job and that’s the list of packages to updates:

Update with Zypper

A similar result can be achieved with zypper as well:

$ sudo zypper dup --from Packman --allow-vendor-change

Final thoughts

Of course, once the operations above are complete, to make everything work fine, all the browser’s windows must be restarted. I am talking about shutting down all the opened instances and re-open them.

To be sure, save the work left open on it and type in a terminal:

$ killall chromium

or any other browser you are using (firefox, falkon, brave-browser, …), restart it, and everything should work fine!

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