Why my firefox browser can't read H.264 video ?
Hello,
on one of our workstations running Windows XP, the MP4 videos are not displayed in Firefox (version 31). The problem is reproducible for example with the following page:
http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html
In the location of the MP4 area, the following error message is displayed "no video, the format or the mime type is managed was found." (Translated from french).
The two other video formats in the same page are displayed without problem.
On the same machine, the MP4 video is also displayed without problem in Google Chrome.
And the video is also shown on another computer with the same version of Firefox on Windows 7 but this time (I have not tried other Windows XP workstations).
I can see here that the last versions of Firefox are supposed to be able to read h264 video in the "video" tag of html5. Or does it deppends also from the Operating system ?
Any idea?
thanks for your help, Fred
All Replies (9)
Hello Fred, to avoid patent issues, support for MPEG 4, H.264, MP3 and AAC is not built directly into Firefox on desktop. Instead it relies on support from the OS to decode these formats. Windows XP didn't ship with a H.264 video decoder (unlike Win7), so Firefox won't be able to play that content natively on the machine.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Supported_media_formats
Thanks for your answer.
Howerver, Google Chrome is able to read the video on the same station. Could it means that Chrome includes its own video decoder ?
For Firefox, can it be fixed on this station by installing a Codec on the station ?
Thanks, Fred
We report me the following page : http://caniuse.com/mpeg4
The support of MPEG-4/H.264 appears in dark green for the version 33 of Firefox. Does it mean that a future version of Firefox will support this format even in Windows XP ?
Thanks, Fred
no, in firefox 33 the situation won't change in regards to mp4 - < video > playback in xp. cisco's open h264 codec will be added in this version, but that's used for webrtc communication and is not ready for < video > support yet - there would be further work that needs to be done., but there are no plans for it yet (and since XP is unsupported by microsoft, mozilla will likely be cautious of the amount of resources it is investing to develop new features for this old OS)...
Modified by philipp
You can try to use a media player like VLC or MPlayer to play such H.264 videos.
How come the creators of the KLM Codec package haven't run into those patent issues? I don't see anyone suing them out of existence. And, since Firefox can't show H.264, how about letting Firefox use the KLM Codec/Mediaplayer Classic as a plugin? Wouldn't that solve everything? Firefox could play any video on the planet, that way, and any audio.
Modified by gridsleep
Feel free to install whatever Codec pack you care to, Mozilla has its own plans that involve the Cisco open h264 codec, as philipp explained a couple of months ago.
And is the Cisco code going to develop into an actually useful codec this century? Right here, right now, which is when this problem is occurring, that Cisco plugin is valueless and philipp's explanation is not reassuring.
Sorry, reassuring or not, that's how it is for now. It does need a lot more work, and WinXP may or may not be fully supported by either Cisco or Mozilla as far as that open.h.264 codec is concerned.