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Hi,
I would just like a clarification on the following tweak:
The ArchWiki page on Firefox Tweaks has the following suggestion
If WebM MSE is enabled when Youtube is set to use the HTML5 player by default, Youtube will use VP9 video by default to save bandwidth. However, hardware acceleration is not available for VP9, if you want to use hardware acceleration with youtube video especially if you have less capable hardware consider setting
media.mediasource.webm.enabledto false to make youtube stream H.264 video for which hardware acceleration is widely available.
To verify if WebM (VP9) is enabled go to youtube.com/html5. If "MSE & WebM VP9" is not supported, youtube will use H264.
AFAIK, Firefox does not yet accelerate H.264 on Linux anyway. So, isn't the tweak kind of irrelevant at this point in time, and aren't we better off using webm to save bandwidth.
I am running radeon drivers with mesa-vdpau.
Thanks.
Last edited by easysid (2016-01-30 09:49:41)
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This option is enabled by default since FF 43 (or 44 not sure), I think Firefox already have H.264 video acceleration.
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Nope, there's no hardware video decoding in Firefox yet. Watch these two bugs: vaapi and vdpau.
That said, "bandwidth saving" would not be my criteria for choosing the format. Yeah, bitrates of webm videos on youtube do tend to be lower than the h264 bitrates, but considering how bloated today's web is, I seriously doubt it makes a noticeable difference.
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Nope, there's no hardware video decoding in Firefox yet. Watch these two bugs: vaapi and vdpau.
That said, "bandwidth saving" would not be my criteria for choosing the format. Yeah, bitrates of webm videos on youtube do tend to be lower than the h264 bitrates, but considering how bloated today's web is, I seriously doubt it makes a noticeable difference.
But there isn't any performance advantage then, by choosing h264 over webm. Is there?
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It could be that ffmpeg's h264 decoder is more optimized than its vp9 decoder, in which case choosing h264 will give you less CPU usage. But I don't have numbers to back this up, you'd need to test yourself which decoder is more efficient.
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OK. Thanks for the help. I will mark the thread as solved. I think that the wiki can do with a little clarification though.
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