1340821 - Allow usage of DirectShow filters for video processing [feature request]

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Mykola]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0
Build ID: 20170125094131

Steps to reproduce:

I have noticed, that I more and more frequently watch videos online. But each time I want to watch some big movie, I have to download it, and use video player for local playback. This is not because my internet connection is slow (it is not), but because my player can view movies orders of magnitude better, than Firefox. The most useful image processing algorithms, that my player uses, are hidden in DirectShow filters. For example: madVR, SVP and others. Please, allow usage of DirectShow filters in Firefox for video processing.


Actual results:

Same video in Firefox looks much worse than in separate video player.

Comment 1

[Anthony Jones (:ajones, :kentuckyfriedtakahe, :k17e)]

Can you give an example?

Comment 2

[Mykola]

You can see effect on this test video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MttP5NwDOfw On usual videos it is not very noticeable, but still exist. The same video with SVP (https://www.svp-team.com/) filter plays orders of magnitude better, like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5XdghuwLOM . Of course not everybody likes frame interpolation, but there are also other useful filters. It is hard to find videos, where you will immediately see the difference with MadVR, but here you can find screenshots: https://wiki.mikejung.biz/MadVR_Chroma_Upscaling_1080p_Image_Quality (Firefox will perform as "MPC-HC Default Settings EVR").

Comment 3

[Anthony Jones (:ajones, :kentuckyfriedtakahe, :k17e)]

The unfortunate reality is that DirectShow is an old API which is really hard to use and we no longer support (with the final EOL for Windows XP support). The feature wouldn't benefit many people in the end. We considered adding additional video processing to Firefox but ultimtely it makes more sense to download a higher quiality stream. Codec efficiency (e.g. the av1 codec) is a better investment for us. High quality scalers would be nice but people would likely have an issue with the additional power consumption.

Comment 4

[Mykola]

In video players world people seem to care only about DirectShow and neglect all other API's. If it is to complex for Firefox, then maybe there is some library, that could wrap DirectShow and simplify things? Having DirectShow is nice because it is highly configurable. By default in Windows it is set to minimize resource usage, but if user needs more features, than he can easily tweak his system. And as I already mentioned, with DirectShow you do not need to reinvent the wheel, but can use existing algorithms, written by others.
As for quality of the streams, lets face it: it's web and the bandwidth always will be limited.

Comment 5

[Anthony Jones (:ajones, :kentuckyfriedtakahe, :k17e)]

Adding support for DirectShow would likely be an insurmountable amount of work for only a small number of users. I'm going to close this bug because it is unlikely that someone external would contribute a patch and stick around to maintain it. We do not have time to do it and we have already moved away from DirectShow for MP3 becuase MFTransform is a much more suitable API for applications such as a browser to use. Anyone wanting to contribute such a patch should needinfo me.