Firefox Finally Introducing MKV Playback Support (phoronix.com) 48
An anonymous reader shares a report: Within the nightly builds of the Firefox web browser is finally the ability to support playback of Matroska "MKV" content. Enabled just within the Firefox Nightly builds for now or opting in within the media.mkv.enabled preference is the ability to support MKV playback.
Initially just AVC/H.264 and AAC within MKV containers are supported but other codec support will be expanded over time. For the past eight years there has been this feature request for supporting Matroska/MKV playback support.
Initially just AVC/H.264 and AAC within MKV containers are supported but other codec support will be expanded over time. For the past eight years there has been this feature request for supporting Matroska/MKV playback support.
Next up... (Score:1)
...jpg support. Maybe even .txt file, if they really are cracking.
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on the other hand if FF could display TIF images (like safari can) then that would be useful.
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I've been using the internal PDF viewer in Firefox without issues (except that it's slow and has a poor feature set) until recently, when it stopped drawing correctly for me. Very weird.
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Nah, I don't use Wayland. I had a bunch of problems with it the first time I tried it and so I didn't bother for some time. More recently I saw that the system had trouble putting windows back where I left them and bounced.
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Why am I not surprised?
Overheard in an office at RedHat:
"OK, we've been working on Wayland for 15 years and it still doesn't work. What should we do?"
"Well, it is better than X11?"
"Not even slightly. It's even slower, and critical functionality is missing."
"Hmm, OK, well why don't we just force it on everyone? We'll claim X11 is "inefficient" because of issues that were literally fixed in 1991, and claim it doesn't have key functionality and is insecure because of issues we could have spent the last 15 year
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For a solid year now printing a page from a pdf is broken. Say you're currently viewing page 10 and wish to print that particular page. You click print and then click the selection to "current page" and the preview pane does not change. You click print and no surprise it prints the first page, not the one you just specified. Now you have to click "custom" and type the actual number. How is something like that remain broken? It happens on both Windows and Linux across multiple machines.
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There's a reason TIFF stands for Thousands of Incompatible File Formats. It's probably time to take TIFF behind the barn.
Just what I wanted to donate money for! NOT. (Score:2)
Or maybe a mutation of the old joke attributed to Lincoln is more appropriate?
"For the sort of people who like MKV, then this is the sort of thing they will like!"
Let me try to mutate my analysis of the Firefox business-model problem in terms of "time >> money". Whenever I see a new feature report I usually start with the question "Is this something I would have donated money to help implement?" Not limited to Firefox, by the way. Actually not even limited to donation-supported software, though it wou
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ChatGPT's explanation of its mistake was probably the most interesting part of the experiment, because it claimed to be trying to do the right thing--and yet the code failed miserably
That's the weird beauty of hallucination. It's hallucinating both the explanation and the code. It just turns out that there's no part of the explanation that we can't interpret with small changes in it, while there are parts of the code which must be just so to achieve the desired result.
MKV. Of course. (Score:2)
Everyone knows what the MKV format is. It's something they use every day. No need to offer an explanation of what MKV offers compared to other formats. It's as clear as granite.
Re: MKV. Of course. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you don't know, you don't care.
If you care, you know.
If you complain about not knowing then you neither know nor care, and just want to complain.
Slashdot thanks you for increasing ad impressions no matter why you replied, of course. Thank you for your service!
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I don't think that's quite fair. People aren't always already knowledgeable about information that may be of interest to them, or may turn out to be useful or important to them.
Also, Slashdot submissions do have a track record for over-explaining widely-known stuff while throwing out obscure acronyms as if everyone in the world is already familiar with them.
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There are several technical topics on which I have varying expertise with the state of the art at the time I was working with them, but have a very shallow understanding of newer developments.
It pays to notice this as it is happening to you, because you'll *feel* like you should know what you're talking about, but quickly find out you don't.
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You'll eventually become aware of a third category - the one in which you're out of date.
You're not wrong, but there is nobody anywhere on the planet who cares at all about video container formats who is not familiar with MKV.
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If you don't know, you don't care.
If you care, you know.
I doubt that most people are even aware of videos in .MKV format
All the websites offering downloads of pirated movies and television shows have them in .MKV format, probably because of its good picture quality and smaller file size. However, this is not something you would use a web browser for. You would watch them offline using a video player.
Very few, if any, mainstream websites that are hosting videos are using the .MKV format.
Re: MKV. Of course. (Score:5, Funny)
"All the websites offering downloads of pirated movies and television shows have them in .MKV format, probably because of its good picture quality and smaller file size."
You have no idea what you are talking about. MKV is a container format, not a video codec. It does not offer smaller file sizes than any other container. What it does offer over other containers is more flexibility. You can have arbitrary numbers of subtitles and audio tracks for example.
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"All the websites offering downloads of pirated movies and television shows have them in .MKV format, probably because of its good picture quality and smaller file size."
You have no idea what you are talking about. MKV is a container format, not a video codec. It does not offer smaller file sizes than any other container.
I never said it was a codec. It is a file format that offers better compression. That's why a 1920 x 1080 video in an .mkv container is smaller that the same video in .mp4 format. Or maybe you live in an alternate universe where 500mb is not smaller than 1.2gb
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But... That's you saying it's a codec.
MKV can contain MP4. A raw MP4 and that same file contained in an MKV would be virtually the same size (unless the MKV contains other things too).
Re: MKV. Of course. (Score:2)
Are you mixing up MP4, the ubiquitous file format (container, like MKV) with MPEG-4 video, the outdated codec that preceded AVC? DivX popularised MPEG-4 video in MKV a long time ago, but they tried to move on to AVC and HEVC, also a long time ago now.
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I never said it was a codec. It is a file format that offers better compression.
What you're actually saying is that you don't understand the difference between a container and a codec.
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That's simply not true. MP4 and MKV are containers with low overload, unlike MPEG-2 TS where the container overhead can add up to 8-10%, especially for low bitrate audio and video.
Containers have nothing to with how much video is compressed. While MKV can have compressed headers, this makes little difference unless you're dealing
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If what you said were true, online video services would use MKV, they can't afford to waste so much moneyÂon a streams that are 140% bigger. But that's not true is it? HLS and MPEG-DASH and CMAF are all based on MP4/base ISO media format (fragmented MP4 to be precise). It wouldn't be in their commercial interests to use such an inefficient format.
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Compression is a property of the codec - codec literally being a portmanteau of encode / decode.
The MKV file format is a container that has the binary video / audio tracks, metadata about what codec was used on those video / audio tracks, alternate audio tracks, subtitles by language, etc.
MKV specifies no compression - the codec named within the MKV for the media stream does that. MKV simply records what codec was used to encode the video / audio streams (codecs are things like H.264, Dolby AC3, etc.)
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It is a file format that offers better compression.
MKV offers no compression. It is a container. If your file is 700mb smaller in MKV it's because you actually recompressed the video stream with a different underlying codec or different parameters.
In fact MKV is a container that contains *MORE* overhead resulting in *LARGER* files than MP4 for the same content stored. That is largely due to additional features not present in the MP4 container format.
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It's a video container format, like MP4 or MOV or AVI or WMV, but conspicuously lacking any of their limitations, so naturally only Linux programs support it and commercial entities won't touch it with a 10' pole... until now, when Firefox decided to finally add support while also adding back in several key limitations to their own implementation. Hmmm...
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MKV enjoys widespread support, including in commercial software. Davinci Resolve (video editor) will import it and export to it, for example.
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Davinci Resolve is wierd, it still can't do AAC on Linux. The last post in this thread was July this year: https://forum.blackmagicdesign... [blackmagicdesign.com]
It's free or cheap because Black Magic are a hardware company. They're not interested in feature parity on all platforms. In fact they're not interested in any codecs and formats that cost them money, hence MainConcept's plugins.
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AAC isn't free for software vendors. They would have to pay a licence fee for every user, including the free ones. ffmpeg just doesn't seem to care, but technically binary builds should too. For a company they can't really risk getting sued for it.
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My tv will play mkv files just fine from a flash drive.
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Everyone knows what the MKV format is. It's something they use every day. No need to offer an explanation of what MKV offers compared to other formats. It's as clear as granite.
Yes.
Oh wait you were serious? Well hopefully you read the same sentence where it is clear that it's a container format. And if that wasn't clear from this post then this entire post is not remotely something you're interested in.
New for Nerds. (Score:2)
* Hi Apple, this is your fault.
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The amount of times my browser has stumbled across an actual mkv file is still approximately zero.
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>"The amount of times my browser has stumbled across an actual mkv file is still approximately zero."
I converted all my home videos and other stuff to MKV containers years ago. But I haven't really had to the need to point my browser at them directly. Yet, it is still a great thing they are adding MKV support, even if this initial support is a bit limited.
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That's terrific, but probably not something you should brag about on a tech website.
Not all of us watch videos only if we're watching some ad-infested cloud based service.
Nice. Now do h.265. (Score:2)
... because I love installing Chromium forks to view the feed from, I don't know, every IP camera made in the past 5 years or so.
Yes, yes, I know. AV1. Lovely codec. Minimal embedded hardware support. And even with relatively modern CPUs, the non-GPU-accelerated encoding performance is abysmal.
Re:Nice. Now do h.265. (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you doing a lot of encoding in your browser?
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Are you doing a lot of encoding in your browser?
I was thinking more of the embedded device end of things -- IP cams and such doing the encoding, and browsers doing the viewing.
But as another commenter points out, FF seems to be doing h265 these days, so.. yeah, auto-facepalm.
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Firefox already supports h265
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Firefox already supports h265
Well, don't I look silly now, it appears it does. I got so sick of it not working, or only working on Windows with that codec pack thing installed, I quit trying.
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That added that quietly, didn't they? Partial support started in April this year, years after the other browsers.
https://caniuse.com/?search=he... [caniuse.com]
Activism (Score:2)
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This is literally a story about a new feature Mozilla developed.