HTML5 video playbackRate and Ogg chaining support landed in Firefox

Paul Adenot has recently landed patches in Firefox to enable the playbackRate attribute on HTML5 <audio> and <video> elements.

This is a cool feature that I've been looking forward to for a while; it means users can speed up playback of videos (and audio) so that you can for example watch presentations sped up and only slow down for the interesting bits. Currently Firefox's <video> controls don't have support for playbackRate, but it is accessible from JavaScript, and hopefully we'll get support added to our built-in controls soon.

Paul has also finally landed support for Ogg chaining. This has been strongly desired for quite some time by community members, and the final patch also had contributions from "oneman" (David Richards), who also was a strong advocate for this feature.

We decided to reduce the scope of our chaining implementation in order to make it easier and quicker to implement. We targeted the features most desired by internet radio providers, and so we only support chaining in Ogg Vorbis and Opus audio files and we disable seeking in chained files.

Thanks Paul and David for working on these features!

Experimental H.264,AAC, and MP3 support in Firefox Nightly builds on Windows 7 and later

As the Internet has already discovered, recently I landed patches to add a Windows Media Foundation playback backend for Firefox. This is preff'd off by default.

This allows playback of H.264 video and AAC audio in MP4 and M4A files, and MP3 audio files in HTML5 <audio> and <video> elements in Firefox on Windows 7 and later.

To test MP4/MP3 playback, download the latest Firefox Nightly Build, and toggle the pref "media.windows-media-foundation.enabled" to "true" in about:config.

There are a few bugs that I'm aware of, which is why this landed preff'd off by default, but if you spot any bugs, please file a bug in Firefox's "Core :: Video/Audio" component.