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Comment by hosay123 | Hacker News Reader

Note: Firefox currently uses OpenH264 only for WebRTC and not for the <video> tag, because OpenH264 does not yet support the high profile format frequently used for streaming video. We will reconsider this once support has been added.

Yay, another decade before we get YouTube on OS X

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YouTube usually already works as long as you don't have the Flash plugin installed (YouTube uses Flash by default for many videos even if you've opted in to the HTML5 beta) since they've transcoded most of the video to WebM.

In any case, the bug to watch for OS X is actually different: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1062654 That uses Apple's system implementation so it has great performance and it currently appears to be slated for Firefox 35; use the Nightly builds if you want it now and like to live dangerously.

n.b. I don't have the Flash plugin installed – easier than updating it – but if you hit some legacy YouTube / Vimeo embeds you might find these extensions useful for forcing the HTML5 player:

https://github.com/hfiguiere/no-flash https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-all-h...

YouTube seems to be defaulting to HTML5 (WebM) video for Firefox Nightly and Aurora browsers, even though I have the Flash plugin installed and enabled.

I'd suspect most places are in the process of switching to use Flash as a fallback now that the native support has shipped for more visitors. Even if you don't care about the format, the improved performance, rendering quality and networking are compelling.

Ugh, also on XP, darn it.

Settings show it only supports up to level "31" whatever that is.

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