Firefox Video Element Patch Version 2
I've attached a new version of the Firefox Video Element Patch to bugzilla. As outlined in the bugzilla entry, this patch fixes/updates:
I've been regularly updating the Git repository and it contains all these changes as well.
Categories: firefox, ogg
- Ogg codec support can be enabled/disabled with configure flag --disable-ogg. Currently if the Ogg codec is disabled then the video element is disabled too. In the future if/when other codecs are supported this can change.
- Fix build problems when doing libxul enabled builds
- Fix link error on windows when doing a --disable-libxul build
- Fix colour playback issues on Linux and Windows
- Handle no audio device being present
- Adjust element size when video size information is read from the Ogg file
- No longer use channel across threads
- Various refactorings based on email feedback
- Sound not working on Linux
- Sound not working on Mac OS X optimized builds
I've been regularly updating the Git repository and it contains all these changes as well.
Categories: firefox, ogg
Labels: mozilla
posted by Chris Double at 5:54 PM
8 Comments:
Wouldn't it be simpler to interface with the native codec API?
Ogg already has a DirectShow filter implementation.
This way you'd immediately gain access to all of the natively supported codecs, although at the cost of having different implementations for each platform.
I suspect Linux would need gstreamer integration, but since both KDE and Gnome appear to be headed that way, that shouldn't be a problem.
There's no single common format installed by default on Windows, Mac and Linux (and *BSD). So only bridging to DirectShow, QuickTime and Gstreamer won't be useful.
To make sure content providers can rely on at least one format being present if they see Firefox it has to ship with at least one set of codecs. In this case that's Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora because other formats either have incompatible (patent) licensing or just don't perform well enough for web video.
Of course that doesn't mean linking to DirectShow etc. would be a bad idea, albeit that may encourage content providers to just stick with Windows Media formats ("95% of our customers are Windows anyway"), leaving all other platforms in the dust.
Maik Merten
We want to make sure that everyone using Firefox can use Ogg codecs.
Plugging into each platform's codec API would be a lot more work than just using Ogg directly. Furthermore we'd have to drop platform-specific Ogg plugins into each platform's codec system --- and ensure they get updated when necessary, and removed on uninstall, etc. That is far more complex than what we're currently doing.
Supporting platform codecs would be a good thing but it's lower priority and a lot more work, so it's not happening in the immediate future.
It should "just work" and it's certainly not possible if Firefox messes in DirectShow or other system's global codec library. It's easily messed up, even for more advanced users. So just shipping with a default codec ensures that it's not messed up from somewhere else but only when messing with Firefox directly. Plus, anyone who wants to use this element cannot utilize WMV crap.
Thanks for implementing this by the way :)
I got up a running a git video build of firefox on gentoo. sweet!
Is there any way to get the javascript api related to the video element ? or all of them are used in the examples ?
@Noel Grandin:what about this http://phonon.kde.org/
thanks for the magic element!
Thanks! I should have some additions to the git repository soon that gets sound working nicely under Linux, as well as improve the playback.
The Javascript API is currently quite limited as I've not done much work on that yet. There's play, pause, currentTime, videoHeight and videoWidth. The full api is in the WHATWG specification.
I would prefer to see Firefox using the platform multimedia subsystem where possible (i.e. Directshow on XP, Media Foundation on Vista). This way, any codecs would be available to all applications on the system. Also, the browser could make use of any processing filters the user has installed, for example ffdshow.
I wish firefox would do the same for certificates too, since it's cumbersome to have to maintain several separate certificate stores (CAPI, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc).
There are patches for support for the OS media frameworks. Bugs 422540, 435298 and 435339.
The main issue with platform media framework support is there is no codec that is supported across all platforms 'out of the box'. This makes the ability to publish a video that works everywhere problematic.
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