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Video podcast content does not play at all on Linux

Video podcast content does not play at all on Linux

Student premium plan, USA, Spotify for Linux desktop app

 

Video is an essential element of some podcasts, and I have enjoyed audio-only podcasts on Spotify for a while, so I'm excited to see Spotify take on the video podcast segment. Unfortunately, on the Linux desktop app, attempting to play video content results in an error message "Sorry, we're not able to play this video." after it briefly flashes the video overlay.

 

It doesn't fall back to audio only, and immediately skips to the next track in the queue. My experience with podcasts on Spotify is becoming degraded over time as more podcasts switch from audio-only to video, the desktop client skips over those episodes without warning me, and I have to go back to other platforms.

 

I have added extra codecs to my system which allows me to play some tracks in local files with Spotify, but it seems this had no effect on video content, and I still haven't found a workaround.

 

Using the web player does stream audio content, but it doesn't look like the web player has support for video yet. I also wouldn't want to use the web player because it can't download episodes to stream offline.

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10 Replies

Same issue here on Ubuntu 18.04

Same issue on Ubuntu 16.04 and Spotify version 1.1.10.546.ge08ef575

Still cannot play video podcast after updating to Spotify version 1.1.26.501.gbe11e53b

As a workaround, running videos on Spotify player in Firefox 80.0.1 (64-bit) in Ubuntu 20.04 works for me even though the Spotify desktop player won't play them. I tested this with the Joe Rogan podcast.

The following command did the trick for me getting it working :

sudo apt autoremove

sudo apt-get install libatk-adaptor:i386 libgail-common:i386

 

Linux Mint 19.1
Build Spotify 1.1.42.622.gbd112320-37

This fixed my issue, spotify need to include these packages into their deb install / snap install because the fact it's not even noticed is a shame.

Mine is working automatically as of Spotify version 1.1.42.622.gbd112320

I confirm that installing the two packages in Debian Unstable solves the problem.

 

This two packages should be at list labeled as "recommends" if not being dependencies of the Spotify package.

 

Most recent spotify update didn't work on ubuntu  18.04 without installing the additional packages. I've now got video with JRE in the native client!

 

Please note, you *must* use the i386 versions as stated above even on 64bit systems.

Just jumped to 20.04 fresh install and this is still the fix for video in the linux client

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