html5 @ 720p in the Weasel or the Fox

[Snap]

Every few months I try to fully get rid of flash and using html5 only and I always fail... Nothing new. 

I have three metal installs; Vsido, Linux Mint 17 + KXStudio repos and SolydXK (on Jessie, so about to become Stable but still Testing). Plus a nice bunch of virtual machines.

The thing is that both Vsido and LM17 are ok without flash. I can play youtube at 720p without issues. The same for other virtual machines not based on Debian stable or Testing. (Manjaro, Kaos, etc...) This time I setup a VM with solydK, enabled the dmo repos and installed the same multimedia packages present in Vsido. Tried to match the weasel settings in Solyd's Fox. No luck. Still having html5 running at 360p only. No way to change it. I cannot figure out what makes the difference.

As usual Vsido and other distros have this support according to you tube https://www.youtube.com/html5 (of course the default youtube html5 player is disabled in all of them. I just use the YouTube ALL html5 plugin and that's it) I use this page to check the supported formats.



And this is the result for SolydXK or any other DEbian based distro I've tried excepting Vsido:



The H.264 support keeps missing. That's the one. But I see no difference in installed packages or browser settings. What I am missing? Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[PackRat]

I tracked this down - solydx video - and there are several other threads on their forum related to your issue. May just boil down to how the distro is built and what is available in the debian repos.

[Snap]

Ok, a new attempt. Better results this time, finally! A step forward towards a life without the flash sucker 

It works for Icewasel and Firefox. Tested in both browsers in a few distros.

As default x264 is not installed in Vsido (neither x265), though both FF and IW provide a built-in H.264 plugin by Cisco... I have it disabled anyway and this still works. Enabled or disabled It doesn't make a difference I ever noticed.



Typically this doesn't play anything higher than 360p with the html5 Youtube player, But no need to enable the youtube html5 player either.

Go to about:config in your browser and set these booleans to true: (typically only mp4 support is enabled by default).

media.mediasource.enabled
media.mediasource.mp4.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.enabled
media.fragmented-mp4.exposed
media.fragmented-mp4.ffmpeg.enabled

(Actually even if either MP4 or WEBM is enabled that should suffice, but if one doesn't work try enabling the other.)

In any case this enables html5 to play all resolutions without the need to enable the YT html5 player.

I haven't sorted out what prevents the h264 support happening besides having that Cisco plugin or the x264 package installed. I guess it's something about gstreamer plugins of ffmpeg bits still missing for this to work. What I noticed is in this situation the html5 performance is worse than with flash, which sucks for different reasons, but playsback good. I noticed that when having the full support enabled, like this



The hmtl5 playsback similarly good to flash without the flickering and stuttering it happens without that h264 thing running. The shot above is from other distros. They actually perform better than in Vsido for now. Working on finding the packages needed for the full support and apparently a better and smoother performance.

BTW. Once the flash plugin is disabled or purged, it eliminates the need for third party browser addons (for html5 playback or those preventing the flash security issues). But with this settings the playback always starts in a 360p default qualily and needs to be changed nanually all the time. For this reason I still use the YouTube ALL HTML5 just to automatically default at 720p.

Hope this helps someone. It already made my day!