YouTube streaming Opus to Nightly

[Omega X]

You both wrong. On Nightly vp9 works both in MSE and plain WebM.

Not on Modern Windows or OSX. Firefox detects for working hardware h.264 decoders first and will disable MSE VP9 if it finds one. That is the current behavior.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1190970
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1213177

You're on Linux which means your chances to use MSE VP9 are greater if Firefox cannot detect hardware compatibility.

Thats not entirely too. As for Youtube user for many years i can say 99% of videos on Youtube is WebM enabled. All new videos initially encoded to MP4 BUT in around hour WebM is becomes available too. There is very small amount of videos that is still not support it, though, its usually VERY old ones. There is also, ofc, still Videos which plays only with Flash (not because of format, but for Ads), like some movies (free, but with ads). Absolute most is comes with WebM.

Its very true. Those of us who were paying attention to see the drama play out know all about how this went down. Brendan Eich at the time even made a blog post about it. Google was planning to replace h.264 with VP8 WebM on YouTube. Mozilla was going to skip h.264 because the #1 online video provider would not be using it anymore. But Google quietly backed down about replacing h.264 and Mozilla went several months without having a h.264 decoder on hand. The decision was made to move on and use the OS h.264 decoders when available.

THEN, the implementation of MediaSource Extensions came about. At FIRST, VP9 MSE was enabled before h.264 MSE. But the development team decided to focus down on h.264 MSE because of hardware decoder support. AND this is where we are now. If your Modern Windows or MAC PC has working hardware h.264, it will disable VP9 MSE.

Naturally, YouTube is STILL not WebM only due to the sheer amount of hardware out there without a hardware WebM decoder, that includes smartphones, tablets and smartTVs. This is Fact.

[Romani]

You both wrong. On Nightly vp9 works both in MSE and plain WebM.

Not on Modern Windows or OSX. Firefox detects for working hardware h.264 decoders first and will disable MSE VP9 if it finds one. That is the current behavior.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1190970
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1213177

You're on Linux which means your chances to use MSE VP9 are greater if Firefox cannot detect hardware compatibility.

Thats not entirely too. As for Youtube user for many years i can say 99% of videos on Youtube is WebM enabled. All new videos initially encoded to MP4 BUT in around hour WebM is becomes available too. There is very small amount of videos that is still not support it, though, its usually VERY old ones. There is also, ofc, still Videos which plays only with Flash (not because of format, but for Ads), like some movies (free, but with ads). Absolute most is comes with WebM.

Its very true. Those of us who were paying attention to see the drama play out know all about how this went down. Brendan Eich at the time even made a blog post about it. Google was planning to replace h.264 with VP8 WebM on YouTube. Mozilla was going to skip h.264 because the #1 online video provider would not be using it anymore. But Google quietly backed down about replacing h.264 and Mozilla went several months without having a h.264 decoder on hand. The decision was made to move on and use the OS h.264 decoders when available.

THEN, the implementation of MediaSource Extensions came about. At FIRST, VP9 MSE was enabled before h.264 MSE. But the development team decided to focus down on h.264 MSE because of hardware decoder support. AND this is where we are now. If your Modern Windows or MAC PC has working hardware h.264, it will disable VP9 MSE.

Naturally, YouTube is STILL not WebM only due to the sheer amount of hardware out there without a hardware WebM decoder, that includes smartphones, tablets and smartTVs. This is Fact.

Well, first, you can always disable mp4 in setting and Firefox will be forced to play WebM

You're on Linux which means your chances to use MSE VP9 are greater if Firefox cannot detect hardware compatibility.

Its not like it cannot. Its not compatible with hardware drivers completely.

Second, i never said about Youtube going to be completely WebM, but about that 99% of videos supports BOTH mp4 and WebM. Yeah, Google really made a lot of noice about disabling H264 and never kept their word. And Mozilla want "several months" without H264, more like "years" anyway. Now they trying so much to cover that so they going completely nuts.
And finally, i dont really care much about Mozilla's decision about that format should user see, with or without hardware acceleration. Its not first time they saying big words about being open and standart friendly and doing opposite at same time (like that DRM crap they support now).
Oh well, they going the hill for long already.

[Romani]

There is still one question, though. IF both H264 and WebM is supported and enabled on Linux why Firefox\Youtube prefer WebM (MSE with VP9) then? As i said if i manually disable WebM its play H264 with no problem.

And considering https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1198715 its not like WebM really going to be working ONLY without H264. What a mess they managed to create.
This comment is especially interesting - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.c ... 216018#c10

we aren't forcing a website to pick either VP9 or H.264 - we offer both, and it's up to the website to choose (of course, Youtube will always pick VP9, so in the end the effect is the same).

So, basically its Mozilla forcing Youtube to play H264?

We don't want to force users with modern computers to use VP9 software decoder when H.264 hardware decoder is available. When websites like Tom's Hardware benchmark Firefox vs Chrome on a new Windows 10 computer, we want them to compare Firefox using H.264 hardware (or VP9 hardware!) vs Chrome using VP9 software.

Briliant. So much of benchmark result butthurt...way to go.

[Omega X]

Mozilla tells Google which formats are a problem on Firefox per platform, but Google chooses which formats to send which is WebM(VP9 and Opus) first, h.264 second. Its most likely assumed that h.264 can't be played legally on free distros. Mozilla only uses the OSes Codecs for non-free formats and they're typically not installed out of the box like Modern Windows and OSX who have official licenses and API backends to do so. Using hardware h.264 decoding on platforms that support it makes sense from a practical standpoint, its free to use and improves battery life(Which is something that users actually are aware of). Benchmark wins are secondary.

Well, first, you can always disable mp4 in setting and Firefox will be forced to play WebM

Google isn't the only video streaming service in town and the others don't use VP9. That's shooting off your nose to spite your face. Manually enabling MSE VP9 in about:config is easier and less annoying.

[Mouse5]

https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1496 about the openH264 codec.