Thursday, 7 February 2013

H.264/AAC/MP3 support now enabled by default in Firefox Nightlies on Windows 7 and later

Support for playing H.264/AAC in MP4 and support for playing MP3 audio files in HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements has now been switched on by default for Windows 7 and later in the Firefox Nightly channel. You no longer need to set the pref to enable it. Please test MP4/MP3 support in Firefox Nightly builds, and file bugs in the "Core:: Video/Audio" component in Bugzilla.

Assuming no catastrophic bugs are found, H.264/AAC/MP3 support in Firefox on Windows 7 and later should ship in Firefox 22 21, which is scheduled to be released around June 25 May 14.

Edit 25 Feb 2013: Corrected target release, it's Firefox 21, not Firefox 22.
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16 comments:

  1. Unknown7 February 2013 at 12:06

    Great stuff. Is there an ETA for DXVA hardware acceleration of playback?

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  2. Unknown7 February 2013 at 12:08

    What about enabling gstreamer by default for Linux for H.264 and MP3 playback?

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  3. Chris Pearce7 February 2013 at 12:43

    @DB Cooper: Note we already use hardware acceleration to preform the YCbCr->RGB conversion. DXVA hardware accelerated decoding will come after the ongoing layers refactoring, as they'd interfere with each other. Hopefully that won't take more than a few months.

    @Unknown: We need someone to figure out a strategy for binary compatibilty issues for GStreamer first. Or fix the bugs in our GStreamer backend and get the distros to turn it on.

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  4. ksec7 February 2013 at 16:03

    If Flash is using H.264, would it be possible to decode the Flash container, and use Native H.264 decoder instead?

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  5. Mat Janson Blanchet7 February 2013 at 18:53

    Interesting, I'm currently on Mac, but it'd be nice to see if it can be detected with http://codecdetect.com/

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  6. Ryan7 February 2013 at 20:37

    Why have it in Firefox 22, if it appears stable why not push it to Firefox 21? or even 20? Do you even allow that? If it's working well push it forward a release.

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  7. Chris Pearce7 February 2013 at 20:49

    @ksec: We're looking at somehow calling into the Flash plugin in order to support H.264 on WinXP.

    @Mat: Interesting, codecdetect.com doesn't correctly identify the formats supported by Firefox, Chrome or IE. Nevertheless I'll investigate why, thanks for pointing that out.

    @Ryan: We need time for our Nightly and Aurora testers to identify any as yet unknown bugs. It's inevitable that there will be some.

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  8. Anonymous7 February 2013 at 23:09

    Give me S/PDIF passthrough and we'll have 1080p 6ch Youtube good to go. That's yummy!

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  9. booniffle8 February 2013 at 03:03

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  10. booniffle8 February 2013 at 03:03

    @Chris Pearce: I believe what ksec meant was somewhat the opposite: replacing Flash-based H.264 video content by the native player.
    I doubt Mozilla would do that for numerous reasons (not reliable, politically problematic [does it count as reverse-engineering if it's automatic?], features like overlays would go missing), but it shouldn't be hard to create a add-on for this or modify existing add-ons (e.g. FlashGot) in order to achieve that.

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  11. Olly9 February 2013 at 04:25

    I'm seeing an issue where after a while sound stops working on h.264 videos entirely. e.g. on this test page the webm and ogg videos work fine, but I get a mute icon on the h.264. The video works fine otherwise, it's just muted. Once it happens, it's true for all h.264 videos. I have to reboot to get the sound to come back. I'm on Windows 2008 R2. The problem is limited to Firefox (latest nightly). Is this a known issue, or should I report it?

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  12. Ronny Fallas9 February 2013 at 05:33

    Vimeo embeds don't work the first time I click them.

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  13. Chris Pearce9 February 2013 at 07:18

    @Olly: That's not a known issue, you should report it.

    @ronnyfm: I didn't know Vimeo used HTML5. If you right click on the video, do you get an "About Flash Player" option on the context menu? If so it isn't HTML5, and so not a bug in Firefox.

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  14. dave12 February 2013 at 11:35

    What's the best practice for serving H.264 to Firefox so that a Flash fallback covers the gaps in support?

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  15. johndrinkwater21 February 2013 at 05:52

    dave, don’t forget there are platforms with Firefox that don’t have h264 or Flash…

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  16. Olly3 April 2013 at 23:35

    @Chris Pearce It turns out I needed to install KB2483177 (Update for Desktop Experience Decoder for Windows Server 2008 R2) on my machine. It works now!

    It seems that Server 2008 R2 installs with desktop experience enabled still don't get the MP4 and AAC encoders by default.

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