Arch Linux

flamelab

Member

From: Athens, Hellas (Greece)

Registered: 2007-12-26

Posts: 2,160

Anyone gonna try a Firefox WebM pkgbuild?

The source is here

http://3347-mozilla.voxcdn.com/pub/mozi … ce.tar.bz2

http://nightly.mozilla.org/webm/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/05/firefo … -and-webm/

n0dix

Member

Registered: 2009-09-22

Posts: 956

Re: Anyone gonna try a Firefox WebM pkgbuild?

I will try... indeed, downloading atm.

via

Member

Registered: 2010-05-20

Posts: 1

Re: Anyone gonna try a Firefox WebM pkgbuild?

Any luck with that? I don't want to have to build it from source manually.

drcouzelis

Member

From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

Website

Re: Anyone gonna try a Firefox WebM pkgbuild?

Here are my results from compiling and trying out WebM and HTML5 video with Firefox.

Compiling Firefox WebM
I downloaded the source from here: http://3347-mozilla.voxcdn.com/pub/mozi … ce.tar.bz2

As is written here: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Bu … umentation use these commands to create a "mozconfig" file:

cd mozilla-central/

echo '. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig' > mozconfig

echo 'mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-ff-release' >> mozconfig

echo 'mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j4"' >> mozconfig

Then compile it while listening to your computer sound like an airplane:

make -f client.mk

Then you can run it. I didn't bother to install it.

objdir-ff-release/dist/bin/firefox &

Watching YouTube Videos
Go to http://www.youtube.com/html5 and "sign up" for HTML5. First, do a regular YouTube video search. Then, append "&webm=1" to the end of the search url at the top of the browser. Now you can select one of the search results and watch it using WebM. Don't worry about not being able to tell if you're using Flash or not. Google made it very easy to tell that you're using WebM.

My Comments and Opinion
Viewing WebM video is a pretty pleasant experience. Similar to right clicking on an image and clicking "View image", I was able to right click and "View video". (or whatever) It was also easy to download it to my desktop. I was trying to think of a video player I could use to watch it, but couldn't find one. Then I realized I HAVE a WebM video player already running, opened a new Firefox window, and opened the video like I would an image or HTML file. Of course, it played.

The quality of the videos (even "low" quality) looked very nice to me. Playback was quite CPU intensive. Having video be part of the web page (instead of a plugin) made the page feel very "solid". I didn't try jumping to a part of the video that wasn't downloaded yet, so I don't know if that works or not.

I'm am very excited to continue using WebM in HTML5 websites, especially because of open source / licensing reasons.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, this was on Arch 64.

EDIT: "firefox-nightly-webm" is now in the AUR.

Last edited by drcouzelis (2010-05-21 17:58:39)

evr

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

Registered: 2009-01-23

Posts: 554

Re: Anyone gonna try a Firefox WebM pkgbuild?

thanks for the write up drcouzelis, very interesting.  I'll have to try it out myself once i get home tonight.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: Anyone gonna try a Firefox WebM pkgbuild?

Any luck with that? I don't want to have to build it from source manually.

First post, via, but not a good one. If you're serious about using Arch, you need to get used to doing things for yourself, or at least offering to help out when you expect to benefit from the efforts of others.

The wiki has all the info you need about this and related topics.

Welcome to the forum.

drcouzelis

Member

From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

Website

Re: Anyone gonna try a Firefox WebM pkgbuild?

Just a quick update: the version of "mplayer" provided by Arch Linux now plays WebM video, and the AUR package "firefox-nightly" (http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=19830) also supports WebM video.