Video Weirdness

July 6, 2019 12:47 PM

Hi all. Welcome to this addition of what the hell is up with my computer. I'm having trouble viewing videos online.

Some specs: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2
Chromium: Version 72.0.3626.121 (Official Build) Built on Raspbian , running on Raspbian 9.9 (32-bit)
Updated Chromium from: Version 60.0.3112.89 (Developer Build) Built on Ubuntu 14.04, running on Raspbian 9.8 (32-bit)

That previous build was one I installed by hand to try to upgrade whatever build is stock because my credit card's website didn't like the version I had (nor does it like the current one).

After doing sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade I did:
sudo apt-get install -y rpi-chromium-mods

Today, I guess, I tried to play a YouTube video someone linked on the Blue.

This is a screen shot of a different video, same behavior. (I hope this link works)

I chose that video to screen shot (shoot?) because it's a video I successfully viewed before.

I also noticed the same thing on sites that have embedded videos like (which I think is an embedded youtube).

The same thing happens on Vimeo. I've never watched a Vimeo video on this computer.

On YouTube, it's consistent across videos that I've watched before and never watched before.

There is a thing on my additions bar (of whatever you call it) about h264ify Options. I unchecked use h264ify videos and checked block 60fps videos, separately. It didn't make a difference.

I forgot exactly what site I found that advice on. But it doesn't seem to have affected anything else on the internet.

I just tried updating and got this:
pi@Chimera:~ $ sudo apt-get update
Get:1 http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian stretch InRelease [25.4 kB]
Get:2 http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian stretch InRelease [15.0 kB]
Get:3 http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian stretch/main armhf Packages [11.7 MB]
Err:3 http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian stretch/main armhf Packages
Hash Sum mismatch
Hashes of expected file:
- Filesize:11663184 [weak]
- SHA256:8b3a828f29a394eebd7c82569ccbdaa5f888b999d6225bbd8f2fac0e53213176
- SHA1:d07080ba00d03f6af215b503e4a95499e58e25e6 [weak]
- MD5Sum:ce9c7a3532b97f82ec35c99ec3c30d3c [weak]
Hashes of received file:
- SHA256:36678afa3f98b9d40839497257c1f88895f7f803d7aa8c1786b10a340d6967a7
- SHA1:03909034ff6902b6a30f52de8f11083029949935 [weak]
- MD5Sum:44de886238cc90ad7950cd0a0ee743d0 [weak]
- Filesize:7082617 [weak]
Last modification reported: Fri, 05 Jul 2019 22:26:23 +0000
Release file created at: Sat, 06 Jul 2019 16:28:39 +0000
Fetched 7,123 kB in 1min 1s (115 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
E: Failed to fetch http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/dists/stretch/main/binary-armhf/Packages.xz Hash Sum mismatch
Hashes of expected file:
- Filesize:11663184 [weak]
- SHA256:8b3a828f29a394eebd7c82569ccbdaa5f888b999d6225bbd8f2fac0e53213176
- SHA1:d07080ba00d03f6af215b503e4a95499e58e25e6 [weak]
- MD5Sum:ce9c7a3532b97f82ec35c99ec3c30d3c [weak]
Hashes of received file:
- SHA256:36678afa3f98b9d40839497257c1f88895f7f803d7aa8c1786b10a340d6967a7
- SHA1:03909034ff6902b6a30f52de8f11083029949935 [weak]
- MD5Sum:44de886238cc90ad7950cd0a0ee743d0 [weak]
- Filesize:7082617 [weak]
Last modification reported: Fri, 05 Jul 2019 22:26:23 +0000
Release file created at: Sat, 06 Jul 2019 16:28:39 +0000
E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.
pi@Chimera:~ $ sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
libjsoncpp1 lxkeymap python-gobject python-xklavier realpath
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages have been kept back:
gstreamer1.0-omx libavfilter6 libavformat57 libvlc-bin libvlc5 nodejs
nodered omxplayer phonon4qt5-backend-vlc python-gpiozero python3-gpiozero
python3-thonny raspberrypi-ui-mods sense-emu-tools vlc-data vlc-plugin-base
vlc-plugin-video-output wolfram-engine
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 18 not upgraded.

I have no idea what that means, but there are definitely references to video stuff.

Is it possible to roll back the change? I don't think I'll do that, but I'd like to know if it's possible for future reference.

It's not a huge deal, I can play videos on my phone or tablet. But, it's nice to be able to play a video on my computer and not have to go anywhere else or have to search for it.

Thanks for slogging through this with me. I've tried to include everything I think might be relevant (I used to do volunteer support for a piece of software, and I know that "It isn't working" isn't helpful.). I'm good at following directions and I'm not afraid of the CLI. I am also comfortable editing config files, etc after backing up the original.

posted by kathrynm to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I'm a beginner Linux user so take this all with a grain of salt. I would uninstall and reinstall chromium. The command line prompts should look something like this:

To uninstall chromium:

sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove chromium-browser

To reinstall chromium:

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

I found this article helpful. It describes how to uninstall packages in the Linux command line.

I'm not incredibly familiar with Raspian but chromium version 72 is a slightly older version. The current version is 74. I would try to use the most current version for optimal security and website compatibility.
posted by mundo at 2:33 PM on July 6, 2019

Can you post your screenshots on imgur / sites that don't require login?
posted by batter_my_heart at 2:58 PM on July 6, 2019

Sorry I'm not familiar with Raspbian. It seems like chromium is a bit different for Raspbian Linux. The commands I listed above may not work for you. It looks like chromium is automatically included in Raspbian. According to this article upgrading Raspbian with sudo apt-get dist-upgrade will automatically update chromium. You may want to backup important files in case something goes wrong during the upgrade. The article says to upgrade Raspbian by typing:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

After you do that it says to type:

sudo apt-get install -y rpi-chromium-mods
sudo apt-get install -y python-sense-emu python3-sense-emu
posted by mundo at 4:17 PM on July 6, 2019

Response by poster: Sorry about those links. I thought drop box used to let you do that...

Video Weirdness
posted by kathrynm at 5:54 PM on July 6, 2019

One thing I've learned from trying to use little ARM boards as desktop replacements is that YouTube is broken on them more often than not. Until this gets properly resolved (and it's by no means a given that all the involved breakage is on your end) you should still be able to view YouTube videos by downloading them with youtube-dl and playing them with VLC.
posted by flabdablet at 9:04 PM on July 6, 2019

I have no idea what that means

That much I can help with, at least. This part:

E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

along with all the Hash Sum mismatch stuff above it generally means that your Pi has either been unable to connect successfully to the update repository, or that the repository was itself part way through an update at the time. In my experience, these things generally go away if you do another sudo apt update a day or so later.

The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
libjsoncpp1 lxkeymap python-gobject python-xklavier realpath
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.

This is informational, telling you that there are packages still installed on your system that were dependencies of other packages that have since been uninstalled and/or upgraded. This situation pre-exists the issuing of your sudo apt-get upgrade command, and does not reflect changes caused by issuing that command.

Unless you have got specific reasons for hanging onto any of the packages in this list, then at some point you should probably do sudo apt autoremove to get rid of them all and free up the space they're uselessly occupying. You should notice no change in the performance of your system after doing that, since in theory none of these packages are any longer in use.

The following packages have been kept back:
gstreamer1.0-omx libavfilter6 libavformat57 libvlc-bin libvlc5 nodejs
nodered omxplayer phonon4qt5-backend-vlc python-gpiozero python3-gpiozero
python3-thonny raspberrypi-ui-mods sense-emu-tools vlc-data vlc-plugin-base
vlc-plugin-video-output wolfram-engine
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 18 not upgraded.

The last line of this is telling you that your sudo apt-get upgrade didn't actually do anything; it has made no changes to the packages installed on your Pi so there are no changes to roll back.

The reason it hasn't done anything is because of the difference between sudo apt-get upgrade, which you used, and sudo apt full-upgrade which you didn't.

You can use the man apt command to get you a concise explanation of the differences between upgrade and full-upgrade. Essentially, upgrade is more conservative: it will not install new packages or remove old ones, confining itself instead to applying all available upgrades to existing packages.

It fairly often happens that the upgraded version of an existing package has a different set of dependent packages than the existing version does. If that's the case, apt upgrade won't apply that upgrade, because doing so would necessarily involve installing new packages (the new dependencies). And when this happens, the output of apt-get upgrade describes the packages it couldn't upgrade as having been "kept back". In your case there are 18 such packages.

Incidentally, I've been playing a bit fast and loose with apt vs apt-get in the explanations above. apt is newer than apt-get. It's essentially a convenience tool, combining much of what can be done with apt-get and apt-cache while involving less typing than either; it's designed for interactive use at the command line rather than scripting and it's what I almost always use.

One of the few genuine deficiencies of the Debian package management system is that it really doesn't support any easy way to do a rollback after a package upgrade, let alone a full system upgrade. On my bigger Debian boxes I compensate for this using snapshot volumes made with LVM2, but on the little ARM boards that seems like overkill. Given that all these boards run off some kind of removable media anyway, it's easy enough just to grab an image of the entire ARM board's SD card before doing any major package surgery so that if it goes wrong I know that I can restore the card to exactly the same state it was in beforehand.

If I were in your shoes, I'd be grabbing a backup image of my Pi's SD card, then doing sudo apt update until I got one with no hash mismatch messages, then doing sudo apt full-upgrade and hoping for the best.
posted by flabdablet at 10:10 PM on July 7, 2019

Response by poster: Thanks flabdablet. That explanation is really helpful. I cut my Linux teeth on Fedora so I know yum better than apt.

There's nothing of particular value on my Pi, so I'll back up my teaching folder where I have a bunch of stuff saved and then do as you suggest.

I'll come back and update this when I do. It isn't a high priority on my life's list.
posted by kathrynm at 10:03 AM on July 8, 2019

Yum's rollback isn't much chop either; it suffers from the same issue as apt in that rolling back an upgrade relies on continued availability of old package versions either in the repo archive or some local cache, and they do seem to evaporate fairly quickly from both.

Having an actual option built into yum for it rather than needing to hack stuff together from log files is rather nicer, but proper pre-upgrade root filesystem backups are still the Right Thing with both these package managers, I think.

The apt equivalent to yum downgrade for single packages and their dependencies is just apt install, with the package name(s) suffixed with an = sign followed by the version string you want; check man apt for details.

All the apt stuff is built on top of Debian's more primitive dpkg toolset, much as yum is built on top of rpm, and sometimes the low level stuff comes in very handy. For example, you can find the old and new versions involved in all the package upgrades for which you still have logs, with

zcat -f /var/log/dpkg.log{.{12..2}.gz,.1,} | awk '$3=="upgrade"' | less

Change the 12 to something else if your logrotate settings for dpkg.log are different from mine.

A compact listing of all packages on your system and their current versions can be had with

dpkg -l | less -S

and a listing of all the files contained in a package, which can be handy if you e.g. want to know what commands its installation has made available in /bin or /usr/bin or where its documentation or config stuff is hiding, can be had with e.g.

dpkg -L rpi-chromium-mods

posted by flabdablet at 12:18 PM on July 8, 2019