Firefox 82.0 and ESR 78.4.0

[Posted October 20, 2020 by ris]

Firefox 82.0 has been released, with improvements "that make watching videos more delightful" and improved performance. Firefox ESR 78.4.0 is also available with various stability, functionality, and security fixes. See the release notes (82.0, 78.4.0) for details.

When have webbrowsers become about video?

Posted Nov 2, 2020 18:58 UTC (Mon) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (7 responses)

I don’t *want* for video playing to be good in a _browser_.

I want to just throw the video at a program optimised to do that, namely mplayer, which takes about 5% of the CPU that Firefox needs for the same task *and* offers _way_ more control, options, features, etc. for it.

When have webbrowsers become about video?

Posted Nov 2, 2020 21:45 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (6 responses)

Friends have used this with success before: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/send-to-mp...

Personally though, I just copy the url to the terminal and do `mpv $url` and let the `youtube-dl` integration handle it from there.

When have webbrowsers become about video?

Posted Nov 2, 2020 23:14 UTC (Mon) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link] (2 responses)

GitHub recently took down the youtube-dl repository in response to RIAA issuing a DMCA takedown request.

Of course, this has not prevented forks popping up like daffodils, but you may wish to get yourself a copy and modify your local youtube-dl distro package such that it can be built from local source.

When have webbrowsers become about video?

Posted Nov 2, 2020 23:17 UTC (Mon) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

The package in Debian builds from source, and the maintainer is aware of the problems and did an extra careful review for the latest upload.

When have webbrowsers become about video?

Posted Nov 2, 2020 23:43 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

The PyPI package is still updated AFAICT (2020.11.1.1 was uploaded yesterday).

When have webbrowsers become about video?

Posted Nov 2, 2020 23:18 UTC (Mon) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (2 responses)

So you run “mpv $url” where $url is what I’d normally put on the youtube-dl commandline, and it DTRT?

Is this specific to mpv? (I’m using normal mplayer as I found I slightly prefer it over mpv and really hate mplayer2 and never could even begin to figure out how to use vlc…)

OTOH for actual youtube downloads I normally add a format option, so I don’t mind the two-step way. I download to /tmp then can watch while the next, if any, downloads. (I don’t watch videos much anyway.)

When have webbrowsers become about video?

Posted Nov 2, 2020 23:48 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, mpv has a plugin that detects HTML (or something; not sure exactly what it triggers on) and hands it off to its internal youtube-dl-based pipeline. You can set your `mpv.conf` up to choose the formats you prefer as well. This lets me jump around and seek without downloading the whole video (useful at times).

I dropped mplayer years ago (late 2013, early 2014 based on when my first patches landed) and implemented the one feature I noticed was missing into FFmpeg and implemented a few other features I found to be useful myself. I found mpv's development process to be a lot easier than mplayer's (not least because the codebase is a lot cleaner).

When have webbrowsers become about video?

Posted Nov 3, 2020 0:03 UTC (Tue) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

Interesting (all of it), but I guess I’ll slightly stick to mplayer; despite all its problems, it’s a known number, and I didn’t yet need to develop in it ☻ but thanks for the insights.

I’ve not normally got wide enough internet access that I can live seek in videos… ☺

Incidentally (forgot this in my first reply), shortly after posting the first comment here, someone sent me a soundcloud link, and the browser didn’t have any audible audio from it, but it worked with youtube-dl and mpg123… crazy world.