Enable MP4 (H.264 + AAC) HTML5 video in Firefox on Windows XP without Flash

[Alex654]

On 8/17/2018 at 7:03 AM, Rod Steel said:

Are you sure? How do you know with certainty that hardware acceleration of h264 works in Firefox 47.0 on Win XP SP3 x86 ?

Honestly I'm not. But what I can tell for sure is that in Firefox 42 video on Twitch with 60fps is freezing awfully (to 5-8 fps sometimes). In Firefox 47 it looks smooth, maybe not exactly 60 fps, but no lower than 30fps. I'll check this later to make sure.

Also CPU load is much smaller in 47 and 52 (in fact in any version after enabling Adobe EME deocoder). I have a quad-core processor, 3.3 GHz per core.

If it's not due to hardware acceleration, than what? Why video in Firefox 42 can't play with comfortable fps? It it could, I'd never upgraded at all, probably :)

[Dave-H]

Boooooooooooooo!

[DrWho3000]

is it me or is there no sound on some of the FB videos, some seem to have it some don't
if there is sound how do I enable it

using 52.9 ESR

i got the widevine , Primetime, Open264 installed and working

which string/Boolean do I edit, to spoof browser version

Edited September 5, 2018 by DrWho3000
edit

[Dave-H]

Are the videos definitely using HTML5, and not Flash?

You do need to spoof the UserAgent to get Facebook to use HTML5 now.
I use an add-on for that.

[DrWho3000]

not sure , videos do play , just there is No sound on "some videos" but there is others

there must be sound as i get it No problems on a FB app on a Tablet

 

what is the addon, will it work for 52.9 u th ESR I'm on XP Pro SP3

Edited September 5, 2018 by DrWho3000
edit

[Nickmey]

16 hours ago, Dave-H said:

Boooooooooooooo!

That appeared on my comp last night as well. Just click o.k and continue watching. I was watching ORF TVthek while it happened. No effect on speed or quality <IMHO>

[Dave-H]

I was just glad to see "You will not see this again"!
If it was going to pop up every time I used Firefox 52 ESR from now on I would not have been amused!

[Dave-H]

12 hours ago, DrWho3000 said:

not sure , videos do play , just there is No sound on "some videos" but there is others

there must be sound as i get it No problems on a FB app on a Tablet

what is the addon, will it work for 52.9 u th ESR I'm on XP Pro SP3

If you right click on a video, if it's using Flash you will see the Flash plugin menu.
If it's using HTML5 you will see "Pause, Unmute, Show video URL, and Copy video URL at current time".

Edited September 6, 2018 by Dave-H
Typo

[DrWho3000]

1 hour ago, Dave-H said:

I was just glad to see "You will not see this again"!
If it was going to pop up every time I used Firefox 52 ESR from now on I would not have been amused!

I had that pop up once, cliked ok, went into options and turned off Auto check for updates not had it since

[DrWho3000]

1 hour ago, Dave-H said:

If you right click on a video, if it's using Flash you will see the Flash plugin menu.
If it's using HTML5 you will see "Pause, Unmute, Show video URL, and Copy video URL at current time".

it shows as using Flashplayer, the mute button to side of video IS deffo not muted and up, i can hear sound ok outside of FB like on uuotube

[Dave-H]

In that case you need to change the UserAgent that's being sent to Facebook.
I use an add-on called "User-Agent Switcher" but there are many others out there.
I would use one that will allow switching on a site-by-site basis, not a global change (which can be done within Firefox natively anyway in the about:config page).
I found that caused issues on some other sites.
Try using  this UA string -
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
With a bit of luck that will then make Facebook use HTML5, which may hopefully cure your sound problem too!
The "Windows NT 6.1" bit is important, as Facebook must not be allowed to know you're using Windows XP, or it will serve Flash videos whatever version of the browser you say you're using! This tells it you're using Windows 7 of course.

BTW I haven't turned off Firefox updating as I want to know if they do release an out of support update if there's a very severe security problem.
I don't think it will affect the notice as the implication was that it was a once-only appearance anyway.

Edited September 6, 2018 by Dave-H
Correction

[DrWho3000]

1 hour ago, Dave-H said:

Try using  this UA string -
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
With a bit of luck that will then make Facebook use HTML5, which may hopefully cure your sound problem too!
The "Windows NT 6.1" bit is important, as Facebook must not be allowed to know you're using Windows XP, or it will serve Flash videos whatever version of the browser you say you're using! This tells it you're using Windows 7 of course.

BTW I haven't turned off Firefox updating as I want to know if they do release an out of support update if there's a very severe security problem.
I don't think it will affect the notice as the implication was that it was a once-only appearance anyway.

you sir are a diamond I put that string in for the UserAgent in the config restarted, now I get on right click "Pause, Unmute, Show video URL, and Copy video URL at current time". instead of the flashplayer settings

many thnx for that

I will save the prefs file to somewhere in event I have to need it

[Dave-H]

Great, glad it worked for you, and I assume you have sound now too?

I guess from what you're saying that you've done it as a global UA string.
I did that for quite a while, but I then found one day that I couldn't log in to the British Airways website, and after a lot of head scratching I found it was due to having that string set, so I reverted the global setting back to default and used the add-on to just change the string for Facebook.
Do bear that in mind if you get problems with any other sites.
Cheers, Dave.

[Mathwiz]

What does British Airways have against Firefox 57?

[DrWho3000]

I've noticed since changing the UserAgentoveride, i now have 2 seperate Firefox Processcesses instead of 1,  still amount to same as 1 didn't do that before