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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, HTML5 playback has worked just fine in Firefox for a while (including HD), for any video that doesn't have ads. MSE just allows additional features in HTML5 playback, such as DASH (which dynamically adjusts bitrate to match available connection bandwidth/quality).

(Personally, whenever it fails, or sometimes even when it doesn't, I use youtube-dl.)

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No, it didn't work for anything higher than 720p. For those Youtube requires using DASH + MSE.

I read this everywhere, but I am able to watch 1080p Youtube videos with html5 just fine since, yeahh... always, at least it feels like that. I tried it just a second ago. So it works definitively with Firefox 36 on Gentoo Linux.

What am I doing "wrong"? What am I missing here?

> I am able to watch 1080p Youtube videos with html5 just fine since, yeahh... always

Did you enable media.mediasource.enabled in about:config? Check it for Firefox 36, and if it's true, see if it's highlighted or not. If yes (and you are using the stock Mozilla build and not Gentoo custom one) it means you don't have the default.

Sure, you could enable it already for a while there, but it was buggy. For me the default was false. Strangely, it's false even in Firefox 37, which contradicts the release notes. But at least it works well now in actual videos when enabled.

It's only enabled on Windows in this release. If you're on Linux or Mac that will probably why you are seeing the setting is defaulting to false.

You are correct. This is a screenshot taken on Firefox 36.0.4 on Ubuntu 14.04.2: http://i.imgur.com/XMIgQfi.png

As you can see, media.mediasource.enabled is disabled by default.

This is correct. I haven't had flash on my computer for nearly a year and I've been able to watch hd youtube videos in firefox.

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