vlasakm
commented
3 months ago Unfortunately support for different kinds of mechanisms for multimedia in PDF viewers has never been very great.
When pdfextra was initially released, I did an extensive investigation and found "Renditions" to work the best, as it worked reasonably in Acrobat, Foxit, Evince and Okular. (More details in Czech here: https://dspace.cvut.cz/bitstream/handle/10467/95065/F8-BP-2021-Vlasak-Michal-vlasami6-bp.pdf?sequence=-1&isAllowed=y#toc%3A46).
Atleast at the time, Evince was using GStreamer for playing the videos (more details: https://dspace.cvut.cz/bitstream/handle/10467/95065/F8-BP-2021-Vlasak-Michal-vlasami6-bp.pdf?sequence=-1&isAllowed=y#toc%3A45). Did you check the video playback with different Evince versions on the same machine? What GStreamer versions and plugins do you have installed on te machine(s)? Can you try to install gstreamer as well as gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly and gst-libav?
Okular also had an option to use libvlc to play the videos. IIRC at installation time of some KDE framework package, I got an option to choose whether I wanted gstreamer backend or libvlc backend. I think the libvlc backend worked better. But that doesn't help with Evince.
I currently have limited access to a computer, and I apologize for the late response, as well as not being able to test fully.
I have to admit, that after I wrote the pdfextra package I felt a bit discouraged from my experience of trying to get fixes into some of the viewers, and haven't followed changes in them since. It would probably be nice for me to try to check back on support in viewers (open source and proprietary) and see whether we can do something better from the TeX perspective, or whether it's just on the viewer side.
There seems to be an issue with using the new PDF waivers. I just used the Renditions mechanism to include the video in PDF. I noticed that works as expected in my version of Evince, which is:
Unfortunately, it does not work in the newer version:
The video is a static image only, controls appear, but it is not possible to play the video:
The latest Adobe Acrobat Reader does not show a control panel for playing the video at all. It is only possible to extract and play the attached file in the external video player.