Full-screen HD streaming video playback in Firefox on Linux

Submitted by kofa on Thu, 04/09/2015 - 22:29

media.mediasource.enabled from false to true
media.mediasource.webm.enabled from false to true
media.mediasource.mp4.enabled from false to true
media.fragmented-mp4.use-blank-decoder from true to false
media.fragmented-mp4.* from false to true
Right click and create a new Bolean entry with the name "media.mediasource.ignore_codecs" and set it to true

Quoted from http://news.softpedia.com/news/how-to-enable-1080p-youtube-support-in-f…

I also removed (reset to empty default) media.mediasource.youtubeonly

According to https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=206285:
In previous version I manually edited some things in about:config regarding html5 video, so that was the cause of the problem. The new Firefox uses ffmpeg by default, instead of gstreamer. To fix it, I set `media.fragmented-mp4.gmp.enabled` to `false`.

Video playback from HTML5 sources such as youtube, vimeo and vessel has been slow and choppy in Firefox, while they all worked well in Chrome (I'm on a slow, old box, the CPU is Core2 Duo, the video card is more recent, nVidia GTX650 with the binary drivers). Finally, I've found that Firefox 37 allowed me to play back everything at good speed and full resolution (1080p) at full screen with the following settings:

  • Firefox -> Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Use hardware acceleration when available: YES
  • about:config
    • media.mediasource.enabled = true
    • media.mediasource.mp4.enabled = false (if set to true, youtube would not play videos with the HTML5 player at all)
    • media.mediasource.webm.enabled = true
    • media.mediasource.youtubeonly = true