1094180 - Enable H264 codec (especially for YouTube) on Windows XP (and eventually on Windows Vista)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 799318

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Piotr Karol Żółtowski (Piter432)]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0
Build ID: 20141027150301

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to about:config on Firefox installed in Windows XP
2. Set media.mediasource.enabled to True (if it's set to False)
3. Create a boolean line called media.mediasource.ignore_codecs and set it to True
4. Go to youtube.com/html5


Actual results:

On Windows XP (and maybe also on Windows Vista) almost all functions of YouTube's HTML5 player are blue, except H.264.


Expected results:

H.264 on Windows XP (and probably on Windows Vista) in youtube.com/html5 should be also blue as the rest functions of YouTube's HTML5 player.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Please see the discussion in bug 799318
Windows XP doesn't contain a h264 codec

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I forgot to explain this:
Firefox is using the OS capabilities to play h264 content due to the license fees. WindowsXP doesn't have this capabilities and therefore we can not play h264 with the html5 tag.
An alternative solution would be the h264codec that Firefox is allowed to use for WebRTC but it's missing some features that are required for html5 video playback. Maybe those missing features will be added in the feature but I would not count on that.