Firefox 47 Beta Enables VP9, Embedded YouTube Videos Use HTML5

[hansg]

This is also the version of Firefox where mandatory extension signing finally gets turned on. Since I'm using at least one that hasn't been signed (nor updated since 2010), this is where we say goodbye... It's been many happy years, but it will be 46.something for me, and eventually another browser.

[DrYak]

adding support for a codec that is a big giant mess licensing wise does not make sense. Wait for AV1, the codec from the Alliance for Open Media, that's where the stuff is. Until then, h264 will do.

Yup, licensing Mess is the #1 argument brought by Xiph people at every conference their present their Daala work.

Speaking of conference: If you've been following Xiph's presentations, since Cisco and Google joined them to develop together the AOMedia initiative, with idea thrown in by everyone (Xiph contributes with Daala, Cisco with Thor, Google with VP9 - and all together will be used to produce NETVC), the result has been slowly increasing quality, and has reached the point where, on some data set, the codec is slightly better than x265 on some metric.
(See Slide #36 & 37 of the IETF 95 presentation. PSNR-HVS is better on some high bitrates, and FastSSIM is better, including in the bitrates used by Youtube).
It's not yet dominating nearly everything like Opus (Opus: except for tiny bitrates that don't make any sense on the Internet where AMR-NB is still competitive), but it's already a step in the good direction.

[sebastianlacuesta]

A while ago I read Firefox had specific code for enabling html5 video element on youtube.
Does this mean the youtube specific code is now replaced by generic code?
Does this new code allows html5 video element to transparently work on other websites and embedded links from other video websites?
Do embedded video links, with the link from sites other than youtube work without Flash too now?

Maybe this makes sense: https://github.com/mozilla/shumway

[plonoma]

With Firefox 47 Beta, embedded YouTube videos can now play with HTML5 video if Flash is not present

A while ago I read Firefox had specific code for enabling html5 video element on youtube.
Does this mean the youtube specific code is now replaced by generic code?
Does this new code allows html5 video element to transparently work on other websites and embedded links from other video websites?
Do embedded video links, with the link from sites other than youtube work without Flash too now?

[andreano]

H.265 may make sense

That's swearing in the church, but okay, freedom of speech is a good thing.

[Gusar]

The first video that appears in YT when your search for 4k, "Costa Rica in 4K", used to play like crap in Firefox in VP9. Now you can play at 1440p smoothly in a i5 notebook, unthinkable one year ago, when even 720p was stuttering.

That's in large part due to Firefox switching from libvpx to ffpv9 (ffmpeg's decoder). libvpx is still quite slow, while ffvp9 is assembly-optimized into oblivion.

Now that Firefox 46 got GTK3 support, I hope that Firefox 47 gets Wayland support.

Won't happen. As it has been explained many times before, Firefox is not a GTK application, it's a XUL application, it only uses GTK to camouflage itself. As such, there's tons of stuff in Firefox beyond the toolkit, and that stuff uses direct X calls. They've been slowly getting rid of that (for example making cairo use generic buffers rather than X pixmaps), but it's a huge undertaking. Not even nightlies have Wayland support and they're at version 49 already.

Yeah, cool, how about some H.265 support instead. That may actually make sense.

No, adding support for a codec that is a big giant mess licensing wise does not make sense. Wait for AV1, the codec from the Alliance for Open Media, that's where the stuff is. Until then, h264 will do.

[cl333r]

Now that Firefox 46 got GTK3 support, I hope that Firefox 47 gets Wayland support.

Ubuntu 16.04 recently updated FF to 46 but about:buildconfig doesn't mention gtk3, unlike Fedora's update to FF 46 which does mention cairo-gtk3.
So users of Ubuntu might be running FF 46 on gtk2.

[M@GOid]

Ah, Windows only, now makes sense. Also, the VP9 decoder is now much more efficient than years ago. I still have a sample that used to bring my machine to his knees and now is very fluid.

The first video that appears in YT when your search for 4k, "Costa Rica in 4K", used to play like crap in Firefox in VP9. Now you can play at 1440p smoothly in a i5 notebook, unthinkable one year ago, when even 720p was stuttering. Firefox still have some speed difference compared to Chrome to play 4k videos, but is closing fast.

[DanL]

Try the same in Windows. H.264 is prioritized where hardware decoding is available. It's not in Firefox on Linux, so Linux gets VP9.

That is what was changed, so this may affect Windows only.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1230265

We're increasing the number of users for whom we're enabling VP9 from about 10% (people who don't have H.264) to 50% (people with fast enough machines).

[CrystalGamma]

Yeah, cool, how about some H.265 support instead. That may actually make sense.

Btw: https://i.imgur.com/FHUpJ5h.jpg

Youtube doesn't use H.256, but it uses VP9 …
Also I'm glad they preferred enabling a royalty-free codec to enabling a royalty-encumbered one.