Firefox 38.0

Posted May 13, 2015 16:53 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566)
Parent article: Firefox 38.0

Not mentioned in the sanitized release notes is that 38.0 has disabled the ability to watch Youtube videos in VP9, meaning you'll need Flash if you want more than the fallback 360p VP8: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1135558

Firefox 38.0

Posted May 13, 2015 17:55 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

Any idea why they'd disable this?

I read the bug report, but I don't know the context, so I don't know if moving to MSE is a good thing or why it means VP9 can't be supported.

Firefox 38.0

Posted May 13, 2015 20:18 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Youtube used to offer all of their WebM encodes in addition to the MP4 ones via the basic HTML5 player, but they've since changed that so virtually everything requires MSE: VP9, 144/240/480/720/1080/4k resolutions and 60fps.

The only video they serve over vanilla HTML5 video tags now is a fallback 640x360 VP8 version (which sometimes isn't available); presumably Google have no choice in the matter because so many people are choosing to stay on an ESR version of Firefox.

Firefox 38.0

Posted May 13, 2015 18:29 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (1 responses)

According to at least one comment in the thread, the feature was only ever enabled for Aurora/Nightly, so it wouldn't actually be a change from the previous *release*. (Assuming the comment is accurate, which I honestly don't know.)

Firefox 38.0

Posted May 13, 2015 18:34 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]

(Addendum to my own comment.) Of course, it might be nice if the release notes talked a little about features that *didn't* make it into the release, even though people might have been expecting it. The kernel folks often do this, and I certainly appreciate it when they do. But they're usually addressing a much smaller and more technical audience.