Firefox Enables FFmpeg Support By Default

[pq1930562]

From that bug it seems they had issues integrating gstreamers wants with their build server.

Well, AFAICT, that is only for the official Mozilla builds.

The Firefox build in Ubuntu for example does have GStreamer 1.x enabled.

If you go to about:buildconfig in Firefox and you see "--enable-gstreamer=1.0" is listed under "Configure arguments", then Firefox is using GStreamer 1.x instead of 0.x.

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.

There is a bug for gstreamer-vaapi, see:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=894372

Regards

[Gusar]

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.

This never worked right in Firefox. If you search the web, you'll find plenty of "green screen in Firefox when gst-vaapi is installed!" posts. Heck, you'll find "green screen in Totem with gst-vaapi" posts, so gstreamer and hardware decoding don't really seem to get along in general, not just in Firefox. Firefox will have direct VDPAU and VAAPI support on top of this new ffmpeg support, see here and here.

BTW, if you want hardware decoding *now* in Firefox, install freshplayer-plugin and PepperFlash, force Youtube to use flash by disabling all media stuff in about:config, then in ~/.config/freshwrapper.conf set "enable_3d = 1", "enable_hwdec =1", "enable_vaapi = 1", "enable_vdpau = 1". Once that is set, right-click on a youtube video and select Stats for Nerds, you should see "accelerated video rendering, accelerated video decoding". Works great here.

[Kano]

I am wondering if that change only affects prebuild binaries. Maybe mozilla wants to ship ffmpeg libs, that would be much simpler than gstreamer. Right now for h264 a Cisco plugin was downloaded, you can call that nonsense if you use ffmpeg/libav. What Firefox really needs is a DRM addon for HTML5 video, similar to Chrome. The outdated Flash for Firefox/Linux does not help much, Flash 11.2 won't get any security updates after march 2017 most likely and then Firefox/Linux has no official DRM solution at all - you can not expect that you can watch Netflix & co without. OK, there are wrappers to execute PPAPI Flash or Windows Flash but I don't think for HTML5 which is what the world expects with so many mobile devices around.

[Azrael5]

That's why chromium is better rather than firefox at least on Linux. It implements all video codifications available on legacy systems as well. Firefox has to improve a lot if it wants to compete with chromium project.

[Gusar]

Maybe mozilla wants to ship ffmpeg libs, that would be much simpler than gstreamer.

Firefox contains a runtime linker for ffmpeg. So if ffmpeg is around, great, Firefox will use it for both h264 and vp8/9. If ffmpeg is not around, Firefox will fallback to libvpx for vp9 and there'll be no h264. Mozilla will not ship ffmpeg themselves. The plan is to also runtime-link to ffmpeg on Windows, probably because ffpv9 is significantly faster than libvpx.

Right now for h264 a Cisco plugin was downloaded, you can call that nonsense if you use ffmpeg/libav.

The Cisco plugin is used exclusively for WebRTC. It isn't capable of decoding most HTML5 h264 video because it can do baseline profile only. Though even with ffmpeg, you still need the Cisco plugin - for encoding.

What Firefox really needs is a DRM addon for HTML5 video

It already has one, Adobe Primetime (yeah...). Currently only on Windows though, but the plan is to provide also Linux and OSX versions. Last I heard, Netflix is still evaluating Adobe Primetime, so you can't watch DRM HTML5 video yet, but it's only a matter of time.

That's why chromium is better rather than firefox at least on Linux. It implements all video codifications available on legacy systems as well. Firefox has to improve a lot if it wants to compete with chromium project.

Chrome/Chromium don't have hardware decoding on Linux. There is a vaapi patch, you can use it and compile your own Chromium, but out-of-the-box Chrome/Chromium aren't any better than Firefox.

[Ericg]

Using drivers directly for faster and stabile operation is against Poettering religion. Pulseaudio should be used;-)

Well it would definitely be nice if everything could use Gstreamer, bring some more standardization, but Mozilla can't wait around for the Gstreamer guys to fix their stuff, and they've got other jobs to work on, so ffmpeg it is

[KellyClowers]

As long as they don't remove GStreamer support, I don't care. Using gst 1.x with iceweasel and it works fine. GST is what everyone should be using on Linux anyway.

[KellyClowers]

That's why chromium is better rather than firefox at least on Linux. It implements all video codifications available on legacy systems as well. Firefox has to improve a lot if it wants to compete with chromium project.

Chromium, like Chrome, has always been trash and probably always will be.

[Gusar]

As long as they don't remove GStreamer support, I don't care.

They will at some point. No sense keeping it around now that there's direct ffmpeg support. Gstreamer may have worked for you, but the list of bugs is quite big, see here.

GST is what everyone should be using on Linux anyway.

Disagree. mpv handles my video needs, I have no need for gstreamer whatsoever. I haven't and wouldn't ever install it just for Firefox. And now I don't have to.

[Kano]

Gusar

That's interesting about the Cisco plugin but ffmpeg/libav is usally compiled against x264 and then you get the encoder too. But: there is not only one version of ffmpeg/libav around and if you don't compile it against the distro version it is very unlikely that you find a working install - do you really want to probe every possible versioned lib? However they could ship the binaries with Firefox from the Mozilla site - just like Kodi does. Kodi excluded the sources from main tree and downloads those on demand currently.