[SOLVED] firefox html5 stuck at 360p

[ticketman]

youtube now automatically serves html5 content if it detects you are using firefox version 40 or above.
Unfortunately as a result, all youtube videos are now served to me at 360p resolution, and there is no way to change that on the youtube web page.

Before upgrading firefox, I could watch hd videos using flash. The ability to switch to html5 was also available on https://www.youtube.com/html5.
But with the later version of firefox, the option to switch back to using flash is no longer there on that page.

When I could view both flash and html5 videos (with the older firefox), I found that html5 played back very poorly. flash, despite being a known resource hog, actually played back better (with no h/w acceleration of flash in linux, I resigned myself to expect to use faster PCs to run flash hd at full screen). Which is a great pity, as we all know flash is disappearing, but it appears I now have an even bigger issue with html5. Where's the hd video?

So how can I get a better html5 experience? My machine is an i3 with GTS250 nVidia running Stretch.

The problem of only getting 360p resolution is probably a bug in firefox. Once I can get hd, I am then uncertain if firefox could handle it.

The advice of setting 'media.mediasource.enabled' in about:config to true to get higher resolutions did not work for me.
When I do that, the https://www.youtube.com/html5 page says I have:

HTMLVideoElement, WebM VP8 and Media source Extensions support, and
H.264, MSE & H.264 and MSE & WebM VP9 unsupported.

I have hardware acceleration enabled in firefox, and have the OpenH264 Video Codec (Cisco) plugin installed.

Some more info here:
http://blog.mjg.im/2014/05/08/testing-m ... xtensions/

I could switch back to using flash by using a user-agent switcher to fool youtube I have an older firefox, but that is a poor solution.

Any advice?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

In Iceweasel version 38 (sid), HTML5 videos will play in full HD as long as media.mediasource is enabled.

Have you tried that?

[ticketman]

I haven't installed iceweasal, only the 'real' firefox (hangs head in shame ...)

More research and experimentation has given me this solution:

Enable all of the following to be true:

media.mediasource.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.enabled
media.fragmented-mp4.ffmpeg.enabled
media.fragmented-mp4.gmp.enabled
media.peerconnection.video.h264_enabled

This results in the following features still unsupported:

H.264, MSE & H.264

However, youtube now offers html5, and in all the same resolutions as the orginal flash (including hd).

The hd html5 video playback is also quite smooth, so if this sticks I'll mark as solved!

[ticketman]

I found I can get

H.264, MSE & H.264

supported by setting this to true:

media.fragmented-mp4.exposed

Now I have all lights green!

[geoaraujo]

Nice! Thanks for sharing.

[ticketman]

Well here's another mystery :

I repeated the exercise on a older laptop (Acer, celeron 540 1.86GHz, 1280x800 display, i915 graphics).
The correct video driver is loaded.

For this laptop, firefox html5 is terrible. 480p stutters, and 720p is a slide show.

I tried all differnt combinations of turning on/off h/w acceleration, compositor (I use compton), but no improvement.

By using the user-agent switcher, I was able to try flash again with firefox, and 720p is watchable. Not perfectly smooth, but not a slideshow!

My fears of firefox not handling html5 are confirmed for older hardware. It is worse than flash!

So it appears that older hardware needs to use flash, as the firefox implementation of html5 is far worse than adobe's implementation of flash!!
This is just plain ridiculous.

I then installed google chrome on the laptop, and hey, it can play the html5 720p youtube video quite well, better than flash.
This proves it's firefox's implemenation of html5 that is bad, and it only really shows up on older hardware.

Does anyone know how to fix this for firefox?
Or is it time to move to chrome?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

[ticketman]

LoL, but too true!

Whenever I try to convince others to use linux, it always falls at the first hurdle: the first thing they try is full screen web video. Not a problem if you have 1024 processors, but it is a show stopper for older machines (which could in fact do the job if they had h/w acceleration support).

It could be that firefox html5 isn't quite ready for prime time, but I sure would like to know why chrome currently beats the pants off of firefox for html5.

[thanatos_incarnate]

LoL, but too true!

Whenever I try to convince others to use linux, it always falls at the first hurdle: the first thing they try is full screen web video. Not a problem if you have 1024 processors, but it is a show stopper for older machines (which could in fact do the job if they had h/w acceleration support).

It could be that firefox html5 isn't quite ready for prime time, but I sure would like to know why chrome currently beats the pants off of firefox for html5.

Honestly, I have a current low spec laptop that runs fullscreen HD HTML5 video just fine. It's running on an AMD video card and uses the open source drivers. Even machines not older than 15y had some form of video acceleration. It's just a question of proper driver support.

Firefox chokes because Mozilla is yet to implement multithreading and proper usage of memory. Chrome for instance is using slightly more CPU and RAM on my machine, but video playback is great both on Flash and HTML5.

Maybe we should
1. stop blaming Linux (kernel, ecosystem, whatever your simplified term is when you say "Linux sucks") for shitty proprietary video card drivers,
2. stop blaming Linux because your video card manufacturer doesn't properly implement video acceleration on cheaper video cards
3. stop blaming Linux for the fact that browsers blacklist many very capable video cards from getting real 3d acceleration just because they don't run the drivers they want you to and force you to manually edit the flags.
4. explain to novice Linux users that Linux is not necessarily a product. It's more a collection of volunteers that do their best to support said hardware with a semi-official stepchild treatment from the manufacturers.

Sorry if it sounds like a rant, but I'm frankly annoyed by this "Linux sucks because my particular hardware that isn't well supported in it doesn't do X / because a software that isn't under the control of Linux does X this one way I don't like" attitude. Interestingly, if someone were to say the same about a Mac in relation to unsupported hardware, they'd be called crazy, since Apple only supports a fixed selection of hardware.

In short, In my experience, I think that nvidia users should in general stick to proprietary drivers and vdpau for proper video acceleration and ATI users should shun the proprietary drivers like the devil and stick to mesa with vdpau. Correct me if your experience is a different one.

[ticketman]

I think that nvidia users should in general stick to proprietary drivers and vdpau for proper video acceleration and ATI users should shun the proprietary drivers like the devil and stick to mesa with vdpau.

What would your advice be for a celeron 540 1.86GHz with intel i915 graphics?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

intel i915 graphics?

Hobson's choice m8.

[JanPenguin]

I'm running AMD 64 bit Debian 8.0.

I installed Firefox 40. It stops playing sound suddenly on Youtube viedos.
Instead Iceweasel 31.6.0 plays any flash video nicely. It seams Iceweasel uses all the latest Firefox features and user setting too, which is unexpected behavior.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I'm running AMD 64 bit Debian 8.0.

You should update your system -- the 8.2 point release is out and contains some important security fixes.
https://www.debian.org/News/2015/20150905

Also, jessie has switched to version 38 (ESR) of Iceweasel.
https://packages.debian.org/jessie/iceweasel

[ticketman]

firefox html5 performance bug reported here:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=821984

[JanPenguin]

I was relieved last night.

Code: Select all

$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: ALC887-VD Analog [ALC887-VD Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

/etc/asound.conf that fixed no sound problem of Firefox v40.

Code: Select all

defaults.pcm.card 0
defaults.pcm.device 0
defaults.ctl.card 0

ineffective methods that I had tried.

~/.asoundrc

Code: Select all

defaults.pcm.card 0
defaults.pcm.device 0
defaults.ctl.card 0

pcm.!default {
type hw
card 0
}

ctl.!default {
type hw
card 0
}

/etc/asound.conf

Code: Select all

pcm.!default {
    type hw
    card SB 
}

ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card SB    
}

Code: Select all

$ cat /proc/cmdline 
BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-3.16.0-0.bpo.4-amd64 root=UUID=854fdbc7-dc14-4566-bddf-2a1cdc1ef1fc ro radeon.dpm=0 quiet snd-hda-intel.index=0

[stevesr0]

Thanks to this thread (and stevepusser for pointing me to it). I had lost Youtube video playing in the Iceweasel browser and had distorted video when I copied the YouTube url to VLC and played it.

Changing some of the about:config settings in Iceweasel (41) restored the YouTube playing in the browser. I unchecked fit video to window in VLC and that fixed that problem.

I changed all six of the settings mentioned in this thread, although I was able to play a video after changing two of them.

So my question is, is there an optimal combination of "true" and "false" for these settings?

Steve

ADDENDUM:

After changing all six items to true, I had segmentation faults when playing a YouTube video, so I changed individual ones back to false and checking the effect on the YouTube html5 elements.

I found that setting media.peerconnection.video.h264_enabled and media.fragmented-mp4.ffmpeg.enabled to false didn't cause any of the HTML5 elements to lose their checks, the videos (seemingly) play fine and I haven't noted segmentation faults.

(FWIW. I also removed the ffmpeg and libvdpau1 packages [because of persistent error messages related to not having a libvdpau1 nvidia file on my intel graphics laptop] and this hasn't caused any issues [so far] with either video from YouTube in the browser or on VLC.)

Steve

[Briain]

Hi

Regarding:

I haven't installed iceweasal, only the 'real' firefox (hangs head in shame ...)

More research and experimentation has given me this solution:

Enable all of the following to be true:

media.mediasource.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.enabled
media.fragmented-mp4.ffmpeg.enabled
media.fragmented-mp4.gmp.enabled
media.peerconnection.video.h264_enabled

This results in the following features still unsupported:

H.264, MSE & H.264

However, youtube now offers html5, and in all the same resolutions as the orginal flash (including hd).

The hd html5 video playback is also quite smooth, so if this sticks I'll mark as solved!

And...

I found I can get

H.264, MSE & H.264

supported by setting this to true:

media.fragmented-mp4.exposed

Now I have all lights green!

Thank you both very much indeed for the above tips; I now have HTML5 Youtube video (using Debian 8 Stable and Iceweasel) instead of just sound and a green screen.

Kind regards
Briain

[stevepusser]

I tested the jessie-backports Firefox 45.0 from mozilla.debian.net, renaming ~/.mozilla so I started from a blank slate, and Youtube worked and showed up to 1080p video available right out of the box.