Porting/Zoom

Problem

In Debian ppc64le Chromium as of October 2023, video fails in the Zoom test meeting and in Zoom calls. The user-visible symptom is the Stop Video spinner spins indefinitely:

• 

  Video Spinner

The Zoom JavaScript code checks the Chrome version. If that version is less than or equal to 100.0, video works. Read on for failure details.

Workaround

The workaround is to modify the user-agent string to reduce the Chrome version to 100.0.0.0. For example, copy the User Agent value from the Chromium version page and use Chromium's undocumented command line switch to set the user agent:

chromium --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Test Details

Tested October 4, 2023. Test browser details:

Chromium	117.0.5938.132 (Official Build) built on Debian 12.1, running on Debian 12.1 (64-bit)
Revision	fa569fb226df361d676b60404623b17b16dddc8a-refs/branch-heads/5938@{#1462}
OS	Linux
JavaScript	V8 11.7.439.19
User Agent	Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/117.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Command Line	usr|bin|chromium/4029293-82-orcamain_TIME851498275 --disable-nacl --disable-pings --enable-gpu-rasterization --enable-remote-extensions --load-extension --media-router=0 --no-default-browser-check --origin-trial-disabled-features=WebGPU --show-component-extension-options --restart --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end --disable-nacl
Executable Path	/usr/lib/chromium/chromium
Profile Path	~/.config/chromium/Default