1896932 - (disable-hls) Disable ExoPlayer HLS use (media.hls.enabled pref) in Fenix Nightly to see what breaks

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(GeckoView :: Media, task)

Description

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

We're going to turn HLS off in Fenix Nightly to see what breaks.

Comment 1

[Joe M [:jmahon]]

How will we know if something breaks? E.g. will someone be monitoring crashes, user reviews, telemetry..?

Comment 2

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

1. I will warn the Android CX team to watch for Nightly user complaints about video playback.
2. I will monitor Nightly crash reports for new media-related crash reports. 99%+ of websites that had been using Firefox Android's native HLS support (implemented with Exoplayer) will fall back to HLS.js, a JS library that polyfills HLS on top of the MSE API. Perhaps HLS.js will hit some new MSE crashes.
3. I asked about QA testing HLS websites to make sure websites successfully fall back to the HLS.js library. The Media team already verified that some HLS test websites fell back correctly, but they didn't have a list of real world websites to test.

Comment 3

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Risk: Chrome on Android (but not desktop) and Safari (on iOS and macOS) still support HLS natively, so Firefox Android will be the only mobile browser relying on the HLS.js polyfill. Websites will might test HLS.js in Chrome on desktop, but probably not Firefox on Android.

https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js

Comment 4

[John Lin [:jhlin][:jolin]]

Attachment: Bug 1896932 - [expirement] disable HLS in nightly.

Turn off 'native' HLS playback to see if it breaks many contents.
Assuming most websites in production use HLS.js as fallback, the
regression rate should be low.

Tests for HLS playback are disabled temporarily too.

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/a954ed38114c
[expirement] disable HLS in nightly. r=media-playback-reviewers,alwu

Comment 6

[Cristian Tuns]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/a954ed38114c

Comment 7

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Latest update from the PlayStore is still at 5-15, so this isn't out yet.

Comment 8

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

This has rolled out with the 5-17 build and I've confirmed the hls pref is false in it.