I was the original author of the GStreamer patch. It wasn't developed for Fennec - it was originally developed as a backend for the Firefox desktop browser. I w

I was the original author of the GStreamer patch. It wasn't developed for Fennec - it was originally developed as a backend for the Firefox desktop browser. I wrote about it here when I first developed it: http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/04/firefox-html5-video-with-gstreamer.html http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/04/firefox-html5-video-wit... Once it was decided to not use GStreamer for the desktop we continued with the work on the Ogg backend and the patch bitrotted. It was subsequently picked up by another Mozilla developer for Fennec work. The patch is currently waiting on review (by me) and as I understand it it will be landed but disabled at compile time for third parties to enable if they want it. I'm not involved in that decision or whether it would be in desktop Firefox however. An H.264 specific backend wouldn't be too hard to do. It should only be a few days work to get a ffmpeg backend going for H.264 support. I had a partial one implemented that I used for testing although it has bitrot quite a bit now. Your point about having to maintain a fork still stands however as there's no pluggable API for backends.