H.264 Support Lands in Firefox 20 Nightly on Windows

Re:H.264 Support Lands in Firefox 20 Nightly on Windows by jakerocheleau on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @01:02PM (#4943794)

Yeah I'm struggling to determine if this really is a big step. I'm not sure what the difference is between "Firefox Nightly" and regular old Firefox. But honestly, most browsers support H.264/MPEG-4 AVC at this point(especially mobile). I would really like to see this become the primary codec for streaming web video. It has excellent compression ratios, much better than webm or flv and it's the perfect encoding type for HD videos.

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Re:H.264 Support Lands in Firefox 20 Nightly on Windows by azakai on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @01:24PM (#4943903)

Nightly is the build generated each night from the latest trunk code. After 6 weeks, nightly becomes aurora, which is more stable (not updated each night). Then after 6 weeks, it becomes beta and is tested by a wide audience. After 6 more weeks, it is released as the current stable version.

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Re:H.264 Support Lands in Firefox 20 Nightly on Windows by ubernostrum on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @06:47PM (#4945503)

I'm not sure what the difference is between "Firefox Nightly" and regular old Firefox.

Basically, "Firefox" is the stable release. It's the one most people use, and should use. It's currently at version 17, for people who actually still care about version numbers :)

On top of that there are three release channels that offer preview builds of varying levels:

* Beta -- is exactly what it sounds like. Beta builds of what will become the next release of Firefox. Beta builds currently are version numbered 18.

* Aurora -- stable but pre-beta. Is two "versions" ahead of mainline Firefox, so Aurora builds are currently version numbered 19.

* Nightly -- the bleeding edge. Rebuilt every single night from latest code, these are three "versions" ahead of mainline, so currently carry version number 20.

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Re:H.264 Support Lands in Firefox 20 Nightly on Windows by zobzu on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @07:07PM (#4945578)

actually even nightly is supposed to be mostly stable.

mozilla-central is where stuff is true bleeding edge/may kill your cat more often than not, etc.

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Re:H.264 Support Lands in Firefox 20 Nightly on Windows by mcpherrinm on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @08:14PM (#4945782)

Nightly is a build off m-c every night. It's not particularly any more stable than a random m-c build.

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Re:H.264 Support Lands in Firefox 20 Nightly on Windows by acdha on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @04:02PM (#4944815)

It's big for anyone doing video because it means you no longer need to encode everything in two formats simply to support Firefox.

Beyond saving half of your disk space this is nice because WebM has limited toolchain support so anyone with a video production pipeline basically had to decide whether it was worth the effort integrating a bunch of new tools or continuing to put up with Flash.

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Re:H.264 Support Lands in Firefox 20 Nightly on Windows by ck2 on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @01:06PM (#4943815)

It's a huge step for encoding videos in just one format for all browsers.

Even on youtube, 50% of the videos I try to see cannot be watched without flash.

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Re:H.264 Support Lands in Firefox 20 Nightly on Windows by PleaseStand on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @01:49PM (#4944025)

"Videos with ads are not supported (they will play in the Flash player)". http://www.youtube.com/html5

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Re:H.264 Support Lands in Firefox 20 Nightly on Windows by Yaggo on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @03:56PM (#4944775)

You can watch those without Flash by faking your UA string (try e.g. iPad). Feature detection, Google?

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Re:H.264 Support Lands in Firefox 20 Nightly on Windows by ciupicri on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @02:03PM (#4944111)

For all browsers running on the same operating system i.e. Windows.

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Re:H.264 Support Lands in Firefox 20 Nightly on Windows by montecarl on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @01:06PM (#4943819)

I believe that "Nightly" refers to the nightly build. That is it is a build of Firefox that follows the current development branch.

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