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Comment by qxnqd | Hacker News Reader

>Native MP3 decoding on Windows, Linux, and macOS

What does "native" mean in this context? Uses accelerated CPU instructions? Uses the codecs of the system instead of something Firefox has built-in?

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Previously, "[f]or patent reasons, Firefox [did] not directly support MP3; instead, platform-native libraries [were] used to support MP3."[0] Now it uses ffvpx, which is their fork of ffmpeg. [1] [2]

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Formats/A...

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1582271

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/media/ffvpx...

Now if they could focus on native video decoding in Linux, something that actually works with Chromium and leads me to believe that Chromium developers are more committed to open source.

Mozilla are working on a "Wayland DMABuf" feature which will allow for separate processes to share GPU buffers on Linux[1]. For a long time that has been a blocker for hardware-accelerated video decoding as otherwise the data would need to be copied GPU->CPU->GPU which would negate a large portion of the gains. In the short term the work will only apply to WebGL rendering but it should open the door to hardware-accelerated video decoding in the near future.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1572697

I’m hoping Mozilla will move to libplacebo [1] when it’s stable. It’s seems the most promising.

[1] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libplacebo

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