1818542 - Notify users when unsupported codecs are present

Status: NEW

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

Description

[Alex Franchuk [:afranchuk]]

I recently tried to play an mp4 file with HEVC video in Firefox on Android. The audio worked, but the video was black. I saw the same behavior on Desktop. I was surprised to not see any output in e.g. the JS console about this. From a user perspective, this is pretty poor behavior in that it leaves them confused as to why things aren't worked as expected. For instance, I originally blamed the website hosting the content (in this case a self-hosted application with my own content).

I've got no problem with the lack of HEVC support here, I just think it would have been very helpful to at least put a warning in the JS console, however ideally some sort of UI element (on both Android and Desktop) could be displayed warning of the unsupported codec. Otherwise users don't know why things aren't working, which could potentially produce unnecessary bug reports.

Comment 1

[Tom Vaughan]

It makes no technical, business or legal sense that Firefox actively blocks HEVC. No one expects Firefox to provide HEVC software decoding, which would be patent encumbered. The vast majority of web connected devices support hardware HEVC decoding natively. The Q4 2022 MOVR report from ScientiaMobile (https://20991767.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/20991767/MOVR%202022%20Q4.pdf) shows that by Q4 2022 86.6% of smartphone usage came from devices with native hardware decoding support for HEVC. Firefox, like every other major browser, should accurately report device capabilities, and should pass HEVC content through to the device's native media player platform for decoding and rendering. Firefox is the only major browser that actively blocks HEVC on all devices, regardless of hardware HEVC decoding capability. See https://caniuse.com/hevc

Comment 2

[Mr. Beedell, Roke Julian Lockhart (RJLB)]

[e-mail], you should probably have said that at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332136 instead.