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Comment by commoner | Hacker News Reader

The h264ify add-on will let your computer load YouTube videos more efficiently on Firefox, if it supports hardware acceleration for H.264 but not VP8/VP9.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

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Thanks for tip, I've always wondered what was the root cause of those occasional stutters, specially since I often speed up videos

The issue is that Firefox doesn't actually support hardware video decoding on Linux without various hackery.

Right, I have no interest in installing an add on to make one of the most popular websites work correctly on Firefox.

Use a plug-in from an AppStore where plugins are regularly bought and replaced with malware?

No thanks.

h264ify is free and open source. You can inspect the source code and also compile/package it yourself, if you do not want to trust addons.mozilla.org:

https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

Yes, so we’re a number of other products which have been purchased by another party where updates have since been pushed that contain malware.

You can compile/package the h264ify source code with only FOSS products, which can themselves be inspected and compiled from source. Your reasoning could be used to distrust any software, open source or not.

I’m not suggesting that you can’t trust any software, but the Mozilla App Store has proven to not be trustworthy. I avoid installing software from pip and npm also.

But you’re still missing the point, this should be compiled into Firefox core, if it’s a licensing thing badge it as Firefox-non free. Not everybody cares about altruistic goals, I just want a browser that works so I can do my job, securely.

Edit: but if you don’t already see a future where ultimately open source cannot be trusted unless it comes from a trusted repo (yum, apt) then you should start preparing for that.

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