Mozilla at the New Zealand Programming Contest

On Saturday Mozilla sponsored the Auckland site of the New Zealand Programming Contest. We supplied t-shirts for the participants, competed in the competition, and we provided pizza for dinner afterwards.

Word must have got out that we were giving away swag, as the contest had double the normal participants than usual, around 120 people, and we ran out of t-shirts!

I've been wanting to do this for a while. I learned a lot about coding during training for the programming contest while I was at university, so I think it's a great way to encourage the next generation to hone their skills.

We're also looking for interns to join us over the summer, so I also took the opportunity to make a plug for our 2013 Mozilla Auckland Internship intake. I think it's a good way to get targeted exposure to the types of people we want to hire too.

We did well in the competition too, largely thanks to Edwin Flores, who formerly represented Australasia at the ACM Programming Contest world finals a few years back. Go Team!

Hardware accelerated H.264 decoding landed in Firefox on Windows Vista and later

I have been hard at work getting our H.264 support on Windows Vista and later hardware accelerated using DXVA2. I'm happy to say that this finally landed in Firefox 23 Nightly builds. With this patch we'll use the GPU to accelerate H.264 video decoding when possible on Windows, which greatly reduces our CPU and power usage.

If you spot a bug in H.264 video in Firefox Nightly builds, please file a bug in Core: Audio/Video. Bonus points if you toggle the pref "media.windows-media-foundation.use-dxva" to false, reload the video, and tell me whether the bug still happens!

Notes:

1. H.264/AAC/MP3 support on Windows 7 and later is shipping in Release builds in Firefox 21 next week, Vista gets it in Firefox 22.
2. Edwin Flores is working on our H.264/AAC/MP3 support on Mac and Linux.
3. I'm currently working on getting MP3 support for Windows XP using DirectShow, it will probably land next cycle (Firefox 24).

Reducing Windows' background CPU load while building Firefox

If you're building Firefox on Windows 8 like I am you might want to tweak the following settings to reduce the OS' background CPU load while you're building Firefox (some of these settings may also be applicable to Windows 7, but I haven't test this):

1. Add your src/object directory to Windows Defender's list of locations excluded from real time scans. I realized that the "Antimalware Service Executable" was using up to 40% CPU utilization during builds before I did this. You can add your src/objdir to the exclude list using the UI at: Windows Defender > Settings > Excluded files and locations.
2. Remove your src/objdir from Windows' list of locations to be indexed. I actually did the inverse, and removed my home directory (which my src/objdir was inside) from the list of indexable locations and re-added the specific subdirectories in my home dir that I wanted indexed (Documents, etc) without re-adding my src/objdir.

Update, 11 July 2014: Recently the "Antimalware Service Execuable" started hogging CPU again while building, so I added MSVC's cl.exe, and link.exe, to the list of "Excluded Processes" in Windows Defender > Settings, and that reduced "Antimalware Service Execuable"'s CPU usage while building.

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.

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.

Enabling external monitor on Lenovo W530 with Nvidia Discrete Graphics and Ubuntu Linux 12.04

I've recently acquired a Lenovo W530 laptop. It's nice. Running Ubuntu 12.04 and with 32GB of RAM and an SSD it builds Firefox with cold/empty caches in 14 minutes flat, which is pretty good!

It was a trial figuring out how to get the Nvidia graphics card and a second monitor working however. The current Ubuntu stable nvidia-current package doesn't include support for the Quadro K1000M chipset, and the official Nvidia drivers available from Nvidia.com didn't work for me, and left my libGL.so's missing when I uninstalled them.

I eventually figured out the steps to get a compatible Nvidia driver installed and displaying a second monitor:

1. Install the "X Updates" team's PPA, and install the latest Nvidia drivers, which supports the Quadro K1000M. In the terminal enter:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

2. Reboot. At the Lenovo BIOS screen press "Enter" to interrupt normal startup, F1 to enter BIOS setup utility. Change Config > Display > Graphics Device to Discrete Graphics. This means the hardware will attempt to use only the Nvidia graphics card, not the Intel integrated graphics. Press F10 to save and boot the computer.

3. Once you've booted up and logged in, to setup multiple monitors you'll need to run nvidia-settings from the terminal as root:

sudo nvidia-settings

Setup your displays in the "X Server Display Configuration" tab (you may need to "Detect Displays" first, and you probably want "TwinView" configuration). Once you've configured your displays, make sure you "Save to X Configuration File". When I saved my config file the path save was blank. If this happens to you, enter: /etc/X11/xorg.conf

3. (Updated 13 October 2012) Once you've booted up and logged in, you can use Ubuntu's "Displays" application to easily configure your secondary displays. Note that if you use nvidia-settings to write an xorg.conf (as I previously suggested) X won't detect when you unplug a monitor, and so when you unplug a monitor X may open windows on the monitor which is no longer connected, i.e. where you can't see them, which can be very inconvenient!

4. To get your hardware brightness keys working (i..e Fn+F8/F9), edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file as root:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf 

...and add the following line to the "Device" section for the "Quadro K1000M":

    Option         "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

Log out/log back in and then your brightness keys should work!

4. (Updated 13 October 2012) To get your display brightness keys working (i..e Fn+F8/F9) you need to tell the Nvidia graphics driver to enable the brightness controls.

These days X automatically configures itself, so you can't just edit the xorg.conf file, you instead need to add a section to a file in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and X will include that section in the configuration that it automatically generates.

So to get the screen brightness keys working with your Nvidia graphics card, create a file in the xorg.conf.d directory, e.g:

sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-nvidia-brightness.conf

Paste the following into the file:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "Quadro K1000M"
    Option         "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
EndSection

Log out and log back in, or reboot, or simply kill X with CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE, or ALT+PrtSc+K, and your brightness keys should now work!

Caveat: I've only had a second monitor working on my VGA output, I'm looking forward to my mini-DVI adapter arriving so I can have a cripser DVI output. Hopefully that will Just Work....

Update 13 October 2012: a second monitor Just Worked with my mini-DVI adapter. I was able to get two external displays running off a docking station. Possibly the docking station could drive more, I haven't felt the need, three displays is enough for me!

And unfortunately my laptop refuses to boot with Discrete Graphics enabled, the Nvidia driver installed, and with virtualization enhancements enabled in the BIOS. Apparently it is possible with the help of the BumbleBee project however.

Update 13 October 2012: I was able to boot with virtualization enhancements enabled in BIOS if I specified the nox2apic kernel command parameter. I haven't done enough research to figure out whether disabling x2apic is a good idea or not.