541494 - Support ffmpeg for Audio/Video

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 1207429

(Core :: Audio/Video, enhancement)

Description

[Matthew Turnbull [Bluefang]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20100122 Minefield/3.7a1pre Firefox/3.7
Build Identifier: 

Forgive me if this has been brought up before. I did a quick search and didn't see much.

Supporting ffmpeg would give Firefox support for a multitude of different audio and video codes. I would be lying if I said that H.264 wasn't my primary interest in proposing this. I'm aware of Mozilla's position on including H.264 support, but I think this would accomplish it with out conflicting with that position.

- AFAIK linking against ffmpeg includes no codec-related code, so it's low risk to Mozilla

- If Mozilla wanted to redistribute ffmpeg, all of the codecs can be optionally enabled/disabled, so Mozilla could choose which codecs they were distributing

- End users would be able to supply their own ffmpeg libraries, at their discretion, to enable additional codecs

That seems like a win/win/win/win scenario to me.

Reproducible: Always




http://ffmpeg.org/
http://www.inb.uni-luebeck.de/~boehme/using_libavcodec.html

Comment 1

[Chris Pearce [:cpearce (Not reading bugmail)]]

No. We won't support non-royalty free formats, so no H.264 unless that changes. ffmpeg's Ogg theora/vorbis support is not as good as what we're using now, so no point changing.

Comment 2

[Matthew Turnbull [Bluefang]]

How is supporting ffmpeg supporting non-royalty free formats? As I pointed out, implementing the support shouldn't include any codec/format related code. And IF Mozilla wanted to redistribute it with Firefox, they'd be able to control what codes are available.

Nor was I suggesting replacing the current OGG/Theora/Vorbis implementation. ffmpeg could easily be used as a fallback if a preferred codec can't be found.

I am merely concerned that Firefox is hurting itself and its users by not acknowledging that formats like H.264 are already widely in use by video sites, and that they aren't likely to go anywhere soon. And I have no doubt that Google is going to use YouTube's HTML5/H.264 support to push Chrome even harder.

Even if Firefox didn't come with an ffmpeg library, being able to use one if it were provided would still be a major step forewords.

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

Please don't file another bug report without searching first. There are lots of other bugs about it. A possible solution might be to include support for GStreamer (bug 422540), but there is still the question of distributing the codecs. Even ffmpeg is useless without codex support.

Comment 4

[cajbir (:cajbir)]

A better approach, IMHO, to enabling using a different ffmpeg library would be to allow codecs to be implemented via plugins. The someone could do an h.264 plugin if they wanted.

Comment 5

[Jo Hermans]

That's the whole point, Gstreamer uses plugins. Ffmpeg does not.

Comment 6

[cajbir (:cajbir)]

I know (referring to comment 5). I was answering Matthew, sorry for the confusion.