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Comment by sawwit | Hacker News Reader

You are right and I gave it a go: I've tested it with a 640x386 H264 movie clip averaged over the same time span with a blank Firefox profile:

    VLC: 14.0 %
    Firefox: 27.1 %

Edit: Interesting. I tried it with a different video (H264, 720p) and it turned the results around (33% VLC and 28% Firefox), there was more movement in this clip, so it turns out to be more complex to measure this.

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Now you'll have to take into account, that H.264 is a patented codec. VideoLAN is based in France [1], but Mozilla is US. Therefore they can't just ship an implementation.

On Windows Firefox uses the Windows Media Feature Pack to play H.264, and on Linux a plugin by Cisco.

Considering this, I think 27 % vs 14 % doesn't look too bad :)

[1] http://www.videolan.org/legal.html

It's perhaps specifically a problem with YouTube, or the JS events for the video playback, or something related to that:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1163327

Oh well, I'll just use a bookmarklet/AppleScript to open YouTube videos in VLC, if is too sluggish (VLC supports YouTube URLs via menu item Open Network…).

btw, Firefox 43+ on Linux uses the system ffmpeg library. Before that it used GStreamer, which was very crashy and usually just called ffmpeg anyway. :) Firefox telemetry shows that 97% of Linux users have ffmpeg, but only 70% have GStreamer. So this change increases H.264 availability, reduces crashing, while removing code.

The Cisco OpenH264 plugin is currently only used for WebRTC, not MP4 video playback. OpenH264 only supports H.264 Baseline Profile, but YouTube, for example, uses the higher-quality H.264 Main Profile. Cisco or Mozilla could add Main Profile support to OpenH264, but people would still need an AAC decoder to watch most MP4 videos. ffmpeg solves both codec problems. For the 3% of Linux users (and 2% of Windows users) who don't already have H.264 and AAC codecs installed, Adobe's CDM (their DRM plugin for HTML5 video) will eventually allow Firefox to decode H.264 and AAC content that is not DRM'd. Props to Adobe! :)

What OS are you using? On Linux, Firefox and I believe VLC use the system library. Firefox on Linux doesn't yet support hardware-accelerated graphics rendering.

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