H.264 / GStreamer Turned On For Firefox On Linux

[peppepz]

That's the right thing to do...

...after all, probably every piece of software is covered by some patent in the USA. FAT's short file names are patented, for instance, and Microsoft is very litigious about that. Yet I see the FAT driver enabled by default in every Linux distribution - so my first thought is, "why should h.264 be any different".

However, lest they be sued in the USA, distributions will probably not ship an h.264 codec for GStreamer by default... So the net effect, in the end, is that users will still see that many videos won't play on Linux out of the box.

[[Knuckles]]

*Sigh* not nice at all imho. But hopefully we can now get webp on firefox, because what's your excuse for that one now? You can't give us "long-term good of the webs" and all that.

[timothyja]

...after all, probably every piece of software is covered by some patent in the USA. FAT's short file names are patented, for instance, and Microsoft is very litigious about that. Yet I see the FAT driver enabled by default in every Linux distribution - so my first thought is, "why should h.264 be any different".

That's because Linux has a workaround for the short file names patent. Short filename are a relic of very old windows versions (3.1 etc) and not really used anywhere these days so the linux implementation does not fill the short name with an actual short name instead it just fills it with random junk characters. Whenever you see Microsoft sue someone over this ist not because they are stealing a useful feature its just because they want to hurt their competition.

[bwat47]

AFAIK you had to built it with gstreamer support -as in your case- to get it to work. I don't think any distro was doing that.

about time, I would have loved webm to become the standard, but it lost the fight long ago so firefox not supporting h.264 was just annoying. The day is approaching where we can finally ditch flash for good

[smitty3268]

this probably won't work on most newer distros

They've only enabled support for gstreamer .10, not 1.0, which is a separate bug.

[hanskloss]

Is it safe to use h.264?
Does the codec have, built-in NSA backdoor support?

[randomizer]

Does the codec have, built-in NSA backdoor support?

If you use an implementation of H.264 with NSA backdoor support then yes, otherwise no.

[smitty3268]

Is it safe to use h.264?
Does the codec have, built-in NSA backdoor support?

Don't be silly, they build that directly into the hardware. There's no reason to bother messing with codecs.

[cynical]

I hope VP9 support comes faster. Also, I don't know if its just me but the quality of youtube's html5 video player still seems pretty bad compared to their flash player. I'd prefer to use html5 for obvious reasons but right now it seems a lot slower and more prone to crapping out while seeking.

[e8hffff]

Maybe this is the reason why I can't have too many video open as say Youtube will now be deploying VDPAU on my system.