1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

olive · 2014-03-22 18:50:41

I have installed the gstreamers-plugins (all the group) and I have selected html5 playback for youtube: http://www.youtube.com/html5?gl=BE

I can't select the 1080p for videos in youtube for firefox but that works OK in chromium. Any idea what I am missing? An example of a video showing the problem (which is an amazing optical illusion): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4QcyW-qTUg

Last edited by olive (2014-09-22 07:47:45)

karol · 2014-03-22 18:57:11

What do you mean you 'can't select'? There's no 1080p available or ...?

olive · 2014-03-22 19:01:29

Exactly there is no 1080p available (when you click on the setting: small gear at the bottom right corner). But the 1080 is available with the same youtube video in chromium and when I use flashplugin.

karol · 2014-03-22 19:03:38

I can't get the dragon illusion video in html5, it's flash for me and I get 1090p there. I'm using firefox and the YT html5 player.
Are you using some add-ons that magically enable html5?

olive · 2014-03-22 19:07:49

You have to install gstreamer0.10-plugins to support common formats and to enable html5 in http://www.youtube.com/html5

Last edited by olive (2014-03-22 19:08:04)

ijanos · 2014-03-22 19:13:40

Google dropped support for non-MSE streams and MSE support is missing from Firefox, there is nothing you can do about that.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.hu/2013/10 … reams.html

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/MediaSourceExtensions

karol · 2014-03-22 20:02:31

I had to force the use of HTML5, but I got 720p max, so I'm afraid ijanos is right.

karol · 2014-03-25 04:04:52

Now I know where Microsoft got the idea that 720p is enough ;P

olive · 2014-03-25 07:36:49

karol wrote:

Now I know where Microsoft got the idea that 720p is enough ;P

Although a little of-topic, I still wonder how can flash be so bad. I can't play 1080p video smoothly with flash (Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3240 CPU @ 3.40GHz) while it is no more than 10% CPU time with mplayer or vlc.

I put the subject as solved as indeed the question has been completely answered.

Last edited by olive (2014-03-25 07:37:27)

karol · 2014-03-25 11:43:10

Do you know if it's as bad on Windows?

Gusar · 2014-03-25 12:13:03

olive wrote:

Although a little of-topic, I still wonder how can flash be so bad. I can't play 1080p video smoothly with flash (Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3240 CPU @ 3.40GHz) while it is no more than 10% CPU time with mplayer or vlc.

This has been explained tons of times already: Mplayer and vlc simply display video and maybe a simple overlay (for the osd and subtitles). They use xv or opengl to do that in hardware, in particular they use xv or opengl for colorspace conversion (video is stored in yv12, displays are rgb) and scaling.

But flash does a lot more than that, it does complex overlays and other operations besides merely displaying the video, and it does all that in software, because there's no framework to do it in hardware. Colorspace conversion and scaling are *very* CPU-intensive operations, then add blending of the video with the overlays to the mix (blending being another CPU-intensive operation), and voila, slowness all around.

Well, there was no framework to do the complex stuff flash does in hardware, now there is - VDPAU. There's no VDPAU for Intel, but there's libvdpau-va-gl, so try that. *Don't* enable hardware decoding though, you'll get crashes all the time - another perk of flash being, well, flash. But simply having hardware presentation (the 'P' in VDPAU) should be much better than having everything done in software.

olive · 2014-03-25 14:02:55

Gusar wrote:

olive wrote:
Although a little of-topic, I still wonder how can flash be so bad. I can't play 1080p video smoothly with flash (Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3240 CPU @ 3.40GHz) while it is no more than 10% CPU time with mplayer or vlc.
This has been explained tons of times already: Mplayer and vlc simply display video and maybe a simple overlay (for the osd and subtitles). They use xv or opengl to do that in hardware, in particular they use xv or opengl for colorspace conversion (video is stored in yv12, displays are rgb) and scaling.
But flash does a lot more than that, it does complex overlays and other operations besides merely displaying the video, and it does all that in software, because there's no framework to do it in hardware. Colorspace conversion and scaling are *very* CPU-intensive operations, then add blending of the video with the overlays to the mix (blending being another CPU-intensive operation), and voila, slowness all around.

So flash is a marvelous software that do a lot of complex things except that in practice it does just nothing because it doesn't work.

unikum · 2014-09-21 09:56:27

You should enable media.mediasource.enabled option on the about:config page. Also you need install gst-plugins-good and gst-libav packages via pacman.

Last edited by unikum (2014-09-21 10:01:28)

89c51 · 2014-09-21 20:15:19

unikum wrote:

You should enable media.mediasource.enabled option on the about:config page. Also you need install gst-plugins-good and gst-libav packages via pacman.

Isn't this considered not ready yet??

teateawhy · 2014-09-21 23:21:07

I had the same problem , except that i could only play 360p.

unikum wrote:

You should enable media.mediasource.enabled option on the about:config page. Also you need install gst-plugins-good and gst-libav packages via pacman.

After i installed the packages, firefox could play 720p, and after enabling the mediasource option, firefox could play 1080p videos.
However, the T-Rex video provided could only be played in 720p by firefox. To provide an example of a 1080p video that worked for me: (Blender open movie project) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HomAZcKm3Jo
Another thing i noticed is that 1080p is only available for selection if "DASH" (Dynamic adaptive Streaming over HTTP) playback is enabled, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Ad … _over_HTTP
Could it be possible that you have disabled DASH via a firefox add-on?

olive · 2014-09-22 07:47:05

It tworks with the media. media source. enabled that I had not, thanks @unikum. Another problem is the video hardware acceleration, that does not seem to work (I use the catalyst driver with an 6570 graphics card). I can have hardware acceleration with the Firefox flash plugin, the open source ati driver (which, unlike catalyst that only support vaapi support vdpau, but present other major problems, for example with google-earth that become too slow to become usable). I have tried to install gstreamer0.10-vaapi and gst-vaapi but although vaapi seems enabled since I see

libva info: VA-API version 0.35.1
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: User requested driver 'xvba'
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri//xvba_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_0_32
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0

it does not seem to imply a decrease in the CPU usage which remains high.

As a good workaround, I have found that the vlc media player directly supports YouTube URL, selecting the best quality: try

vlc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v2L2UGZJAM

and vlc is able to play the video with hardware acceleration enabled. We can combine this with a Firefox add-on to automatically launch vlc, for example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo … t/?src=api

Last edited by olive (2014-09-22 07:48:13)

unikum · 2014-09-22 08:44:46

@olive: see also livestreamer and mpv (instead vlc that segfaults sometimes).

89c51 · 2014-09-22 22:57:18

@olive

The video acceleration works in FF with gst-vaapi and the open driver. Set LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=vdpau However the cpu usage remains high (its known). Also the open driver supports gst-omx but i haven't tried it.

Arch Linux

#1 2014-03-22 18:50:41

1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#2 2014-03-22 18:57:11

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#3 2014-03-22 19:01:29

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#4 2014-03-22 19:03:38

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#5 2014-03-22 19:07:49

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#6 2014-03-22 19:13:40

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#7 2014-03-22 20:02:31

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#8 2014-03-25 04:04:52

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#9 2014-03-25 07:36:49

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#10 2014-03-25 11:43:10

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#11 2014-03-25 12:13:03

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#12 2014-03-25 14:02:55

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#13 2014-09-21 09:56:27

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#14 2014-09-21 20:15:19

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#15 2014-09-21 23:21:07

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#16 2014-09-22 07:47:05

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#17 2014-09-22 08:44:46

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

#18 2014-09-22 22:57:18

Re: 1080p for HTML5 video in firefox and hardware acceleration

Board footer