Firefox Enables FFmpeg Support By Default

[pq1930562]

What did they use before? VLC?

No. GStreamer 0.x (1.x is still not being enabled by default https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=947287).

And AFAICT GStreamer is still being used if FFmpeg/Libav is not installed.

[Krejzi]

What did they use before? VLC?

Have you read the article? Second paragraph notes they used GStreamer.

[smitty3268]

What did they use before? VLC?

As mentioned in the article, gstreamer. Before that, nothing - all video was decoded internally. That was why they only supported VP8 and not h264.

[devius]

What did they use before? VLC?

They used.... read the article. It says right there.

[Apopas]

What did they use before? VLC?

VLC is a media player which uses ffmpeg as well.

[zanny]

Its kind of sad that Gstreamer could be so bad that Firefox needs to switch away from it. It was supposed to be the One True Encoding Library, since it could use ffmpeg as a backend (plus vaapi, vdpau, etc) and it was much more intuitive to daisy chain gstreamer pipes than multiple passes with ffmpeg.

[Guest]

Wth? My post needs to be "approved" and other people here can post freely? Edit: Oh but of course this one goes though

Anyway...

What did they use before? VLC?

GStreamer.

[AnAkIn]

You're late, it's not only in Aurora now, it's also in Beta.

[liam]

No. GStreamer 0.x (1.x is still not being enabled by default https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=947287).

And AFAICT GStreamer is still being used if FFmpeg/Libav is not installed.

From that bug it seems they had issues integrating gstreamers wants with their build server.
Hopefully they'll continue forward with gstreamer integration (maybe, you know, contact the upstream to ask for help), b/c then we can use the hardware acceleration via gst-vaapi/vdpau.

[Ericg]

So what benefit will the migration from GStreamer to FFmpeg provide?

Supposedly, using firefox-->gstreamer-->ffmpeg has revealed several stability and performance problems in gstreamer. The developers decided it was easier to just use ffmpeg/libva directly since, in the end, that's what was happening anyway. According to a few comments on reddit, gstreamer also was not properly advertising the capabilities of the hardware & codecs to the layers above it. Several people commented saying that under gstreamer they were getting capped at 720p and 1080p30fps but as soon as they switched over to ffmpeg then "magically" the 1080p60fps setting was allowed.