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[torkell]

It's rather crazy that despite Flash being completely the wrong tool for playing videos, it does a better job than whatever Firefox uses for HTML5 video.

It's very crazy that on the modern Internet the state-of-the-art for video playback is so much worse than what any half-decent media player could do 15 years ago. Seriously, are DXVA and video overlays still a thing, or does everything just throw all the pixels at the CPU and hope that it's fast enough?

Comments

[torkell]

I thought as much... it's one of those things where the increase in CPU power means that going "sod it" and doing everything on the CPU is a practical solution. I know I've written code where the fact that it's using some incredibly stupid algorithm doesn't actually matter because the underlying hardware is fast enough. It just irks me because I know a Pentium M 1.5GHz, despite being woefully underpowered these days, is actually fast enough for HD video playback if the software knows how to do so.

On graphics cards: I'm not surprised - graphics drivers seem to be one of the less stable bits of software I've dealt with over the years (along with video codecs which seem to find equally hilarious ways to fail). One part of $WORK involves trying to make Android's video codec stack behave and finding such fun bugs as it only rendering the first frame of a video stream on some phones. Except when it works fine, but later deadlocks when releasing the codec if at any point you decided not to draw some frames.

I may have to give Firefox Nightly or Alpha Developer Edition a try, though I'm a bit reluctant to do as a colleague's install of Nightly regularly detonates all his tabs (despite e10s being enabled - or possibly because it's enabled). Though actually what I've decided to do with the laptop is stick Windows 7 on it, since that brings DXVA2 and WMF support which I think is what Firefox is actually targeting for video playback.