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Firefox can actually use ffmpeg as a decoder. It would be a great option for supporting a lot of these formats. However, Mozilla can't ship it enabled, because
by TD-Linux 11y ago
Firefox can actually use ffmpeg as a decoder. It would be a great option for supporting a lot of these formats. However, Mozilla can't ship it enabled, because the patent problem is very real. See, for example, all of the Play Store apps that got C&D letters from Dolby for using ffmpeg's implementation of AC3.
Firefox does ship a lot of other video and audio codecs though, such as vorbis, opus, theora, vp8, and vp9. It's recommended to use these for HTML5 when possible because they can be easily supported everywhere.
- vog 11y ago> However, Mozilla can't ship it enabled Just a minor nitpick: Under Linux, people don't download from Mozilla but have it installed by default. If not, they install via package manager and not via download from Mozilla. So it's not Mozilla making that decision, but the respective Linux distros. But of course they have the same problem. I believe a good compromise would be to check if ffmpeg is installed on the system, and use it only when available. So the user would have to install ffmpeg directly. That would be a very different situation from including code from ffmpeg directly into some app.
- zurn 11y agoMozilla does not allow Firefox trademark use for distro customized builds.
- rockdoe 11y agoFalse. It's allowed as long as Mozilla approves the changes. This is how Ubuntu ships Firefox.
- TD-Linux 11y agoFirefox actually does do this. It can also use whatever gstreamer codecs you have installed (e.g. gstreamer-ffmpeg/libav).