Firefox 70 - Hackdot

Re:Firefox 70 by padenot on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @11:55AM (#21325132)

Safari does not support vp8 or vp9 when playing youtube, and youtube serves h264 instead. h264 is less efficient in terms of compression ratio (more to download for the same quality), but h264 is decoded in hardware on OSX, and VP8 or VP9 isn't, which explains what you see.

This is why, for example, Safari does not have 4k video on Youtube, while being perfectly capable of playing 4k videos in general.

Depending on the machine, VP9 can be decoded in hardware on Firefox on Windows, but chip support is limited.

All that said, we're working on our video playback performance as we speak, especially on OSX (because it was so bad a few release back), but also in general.

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Re:Firefox 70 by pier25 on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:03PM (#21326781)

Thanks for the explanation.

I found this extension that forces FF to use H264 instead: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

On my old MBP I'd rather consume more bandwidth than more more CPU.

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Re:Firefox 70 by kzrdude on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @02:50AM (#21331811)

Thanks for the link. On Firefox/Linux nvidia drivers, I don't see much difference in h264 vs VP9

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Re:Firefox 70 by padenot on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @08:11AM (#21333724)

We don't do hardware decoding on Linux for now, because we don't do hardware acceleration for graphics by default on Linux.

Web Render might allow doing it properly, since the rendering is not on the CPU anymore.

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