Videos and GIFs stopped working
A couple of days ago I noticed that videos and GIFs were no longer showing up in posts on my #Mastodon instance. Other images were fine, just not animated attachments to posts. I first noticed this in #Ivory, but quickly confirmed that they wouldn’t show up in a browser window either.
A quick restart of the server didn’t fix the problem. Since I didn’t have the time to dig into it, I left it at that for a few more days.
ffmpeg gone missing
Eventually, I got around to look into it. A web search brought me to an older issue on the Mastodon bugtracker. It’s for an older Mastodon release and has since been closed, so shouldn’t really affect my up-to-date instance.
I was about to give the suggested “fix” a try when something rang in the back of my mind …
Mastodon uses ffmpeg for videos and animated GIFs. I vaguely remembered – but couldn’t find it again, of course – something I’ve read a while ago about #Ubuntu randomly uninstalling ffmpeg for no obvious reason.
Lo and behold, ffmpeg was no longer on the server. A quick apt install ffmpeg brought it back – and videos started showing up and playing again.
For the record: The server is running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.