YouTube has announced today that they are defaulting to HTML5 instead of Flash for video:
http://youtube-eng.blogspot.jp/2015/01/youtube-now-defaults-to-html5_27.html
http://www.macrumors.com/2015/01/28/youtube-html5-default/
Just throwing that out there. Maybe some day, Plex will also abandon Flash and the days of updating Flash every 3 days or instead be victim to security exploits will be over.
Plex has already switched from using flash. That is what the new experimental player in the WebClient is, HTML5. The only problem is with FireFox which does not support HTML5 so the old flash player is still available for it.
Safari 8.0.3 also always prompts for Flash to be activated when using Plex Web.
Does Safari not support HTML5? I thought it did. And that flash warning, is that not a setting you can turn off.
Plex has already switched from using flash. That is what the new experimental player in the WebClient is, HTML5. The only problem is with FireFox which does not support HTML5 so the old flash player is still available for it.
What part of HTML5 doesn't firefox support? This must be something specific to video which I'm not well versed in, because most of the spec is fully supported.
It might be related to the video only. I have not tested it myself, but this is what I have seen and read. You can test it. Open the WebApp from Firefox. Go to the player setting and turn on the experimental player. Now play any video.
It might be related to the video only. I have not tested it myself, but this is what I have seen and read. You can test it. Open the WebApp from Firefox. Go to the player setting and turn on the experimental player. Now play any video.
FireFox doesn't have the option for the experimental player on the player page because it doesn't support it.
Yeah, as J_McKee said, not there. Just wondering what the limitation is since Firefox does support the tag so it shouldn't be that.
Edit: Looking into it at: http://html5test.com/index.html
Firefox isn't missing a lot - audio and video track selection, drm and media source ext and mpeg-4 support. In fairness though IE has audio track select, but not video. The only thing that seems like it would matter between the big 3 browsers is that IE and Chrome both have the Media Source extensions and DRM (which likely isn't the issue).
Obviously these are high level items and there might be some implementation that is wrong in FF.
That is beyond my knowledge. Let me see if I can find an answer for you guys.
That would be cool. Not really life or death, just idle curiosity by someone who does web development. :)
Did some searching and found the reason: [Requirements for HTML5 Player?](https://forums.plex.tv/topic/124402-requirements-for-html5-player/?p=742193)
Basically comes down to needing the Media Source Extensions which is described at [this site](http://www.ghacks.net/2014/05/10/enable-media-source-extensions-firefox/) as:
Media Source Extensions (MSE) extend the HTMLVideoElement to allow JavaScript to generate media streams for playback which in turn makes way for new features such as adaptive streaming or time shifting in live streams.
This can be enabled by doing the following:
1. Type about:config into the web browser's address bar and hit enter. 2. Confirm that you will be careful if a warning message is displayed. 3. Search for media.mediasource.enabled and double-click the name.
This does enable them when you go to http://html5test.com/index.html, and it also lets you enable the experimental player; however, when you try to play a video you just get a loading spinner and it never plays. Kind of seems like Firefox's implementation is incomplete (hence not enabled by default) and this is why it isn't support.
So really, this request is not something that can be handled by Plex since it is the browser that doesn't handle the spec properly.
Upon further investigation found here: https://www.youtube.com/html5 (Youtubes HTML5 tester). I believe the reason it doesn't work is because Firefox doesn't support MSE & h264 video (likely due to their investment in WebM).
This is what I have been told by people more knowledgeable than me. In addition to MSE being enabled, FF also need to support H264. It current only support H264 base profiles but most videos use the main or high profile. This would explain the spinning circle in that other thread.
Found a bit more info: [Enable MSE & H264 in Firefox now](http://www.ghacks.net/2014/07/25/enable-mse-h2-64-support-youtube-firefox-right-now/)
Also found via bugzilla: [778617 - (MSE)](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=778617)
Update to "Implemented a subset of the Media Source Extensions (MSE) API to allow native HTML5 playback on YouTube. Full support is on the way". Thanks to Bobby for the new version!
Sounds like they are working out the last few things in the nightly's. Hopefully this will include the High Profile h264 that MovieFan mentions as well.
Found an article that talks about the h264 support as well: [h.264 support arrives in Firefox....](https://gigaom.com/2014/10/14/h-264-support-arrives-in-firefox-thanks-to-cisco-but-h-264-web-videos-still-wont-play/)
However, Mozilla’s embrace of H.264 comes with an important caveat. The binary component provided by Cisco doesn’t actually support all flavors of H.264, if you will, but only a more basic set of features used for real-time video applications (for media codec enthusiasts: it’s only capable of decoding streams encoded with H.264’s constrained baseline profile). This means that HD video streams encoded in H.264 still won’t play natively in Firefox. Said Gaal: “We will reconsider this once support (for high-profile H.264 streams) has been added.”
Early 2021 clean-up: implemented
