Arch Linux

bbarcher

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2014-02-27

Posts: 174

Website

Firefox Multimedia wiki may be wrong

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fi … a_playback
I couldn't get HTML5 video completely enabled in Firefox proceeding per the wiki page, getting these problems https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=179594 (start reading from the latest posts) so I've mentioned it on phoronix. A person involved in some multimedia coding chimed in saying this, among others:

Well, two things here:

First, it seems gstreamer-vaapi is extremely buggy. I've seen tons of reports about issues when it's installed for months now. Especially when it concerns web browsers, but even with dedicated gstreamer-based media players, such as Totem. Also, you have a wrapper involved there, which only increases the bugginess of everything. Don't use wrappers, r600 (and radeonsi) has native VAAPI support now - which means, instead of installing libva-vdpau-driver and setting LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=vdpau, you install libva-mesa-driver and set LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=gallium

Second, maybe it's just me, but I have the feeling Mozilla doesn't care about gstreamer anymore and is transitioning towards using ffmpeg directly for h264/aac, and internal libraries (libvpx, libvorbis, libopus) for webm. Which I must admit I like better, I've always regarded gstreamer as overkill. The one thing I'd like though, is the ability to use system versions of libvpx/libvorbis/libopus instead of the Firefox internal versions. Or better yet, just use ffmpeg for everything, ffmpeg's vp8 and vp9 decoders are much faster than libvpx.

Considering these two points, your workaround to disable the use of gstreamer in Firefox would be the absolutely correct thing to do.

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/so … post801765

I'm a noob, so I'm not pointing out an error. Merely suggesting the section might need to edited at least not to suggest the gstreamer.

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Put up or shut up. 
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Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,576

Website

Re: Firefox Multimedia wiki may be wrong

I don't follow what you are missing that you think you should have.  The second link from the section of the wiki you linked to indicates that h264/mp4 is not supported by firefox.  So a failure of these videos to play in firefox is not an error, it is expected.  Do the webM and oog tests work?  If so, that's all that should be expected.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Firefox Multimedia wiki may be wrong

I'm using the stock firefox and when I click on an html5 YT video, 'Stats for nerds' shows I'm viewing a video/mp4 mimetype file.
https://www.youtube.com/html5 shows that MSE is not supported, but H.264 is.

Edit: Onboard Intel graphics.

Last edited by karol (2015-05-27 17:03:50)