Firefox 115 Now Available With Intel GPU Video Decoding On Linux

[Quackdoc]

too bad arc users on XE graphics wont be able to use it lol well, allegedly

[Cryio]

H/A H.264 has been available since 2006 with Nvidia GeForce 8 and 2007 with some ATI HD 2000 GPUs and more commonly with HD 3000.

And VA-API has been available by default for Firefox on Fedora for 1-2-3 years now? 2 years I believe.

[bug77]

Fedora Linux Disabling Mesa's H.264 / H.265 / VC1 VA-API Support Over Legal Concerns

Yeah, everybody else is safe, but Fedora could be in trouble for supporting H.264. But don't buy that. But it answers my question, thanks.

Mind you, have a software fallback is always useful in various situations, regardless.

[andyprough]

Firefox 115 introduces a new creepy feature where Mozilla has decided that some extensions will not be allowed to run on some websites "for security reasons", but doesn't tell which extensions or which sites or give any information about how they formulated their policy. They're calling it "Quarantined Domains", and it's a "backend feature". They've written an odd little blog post about it and how to disable it, but provided almost no information.

Users can disable it by creating an extensions.quarantinedDomains.enabled option in about:config and setting it to False.

[andreano]

Yeah, everybody else is safe, but Fedora could be in trouble for supporting H.264.

Nothing special about Fedora. OpenSuse does exactly the same: They just don't enable royalty bearing formats in the official/default repositories, making you enable the multimedia repository, whatever that may be (rpmfusion / packman). To the user, multimedia doesn't work by default, but after copypasting a command and forgetting about it, it does. Which distros do not work like that?

[LinAGKar]

Thanks, I was looking for that one.

Good news: 2023 is the year we have been counting down to: The first version of H.264 is 20 now years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding#Versions

That means that if you live in a WHO country, all essential patents have expired by now, for the subset of H.264 described in this version.

Perhaps, but most content uses high profile which was first released in 2005.

[MorrisS.]

A good news for Intel users. If someone can test some streaming platform looking at a possible increase in the resolutions from 720p to 1080p, the answer would be appreciate, albeit I doubt on any possible improvement at this stage.

[Anux]

I thought Cisco's OpenH264 plug-in is in Firefox since a few years now?

[ripper81]

I wonder if the support for Intel VAAPI is enabled by default or still hidden in about:config. For my AMD GPU it is still disabled by default.

[Gusar]

I thought Cisco's OpenH264 plug-in is in Firefox since a few years now?

It was limited to WebRTC before, now it's used on regular websites too.

I wonder if the support for Intel VAAPI is enabled by default or still hidden in about:config. For my AMD GPU it is still disabled by default.

As the title says, it's now enabled for Intel. It's not for AMD cos there's still a few bugs. They're all fixed I think, but it's possible some of those fixes are only in mesa-git currently, not in any release yet.