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YouTube Opens Up 60fps To Everyone
jones_supa writes Four months ago YouTube promised support for 60 frames per second videos. Back then, the feature was limited to some selected demonstration clips. Now the capability to upload 60fps videos has been opened to everyone. By searching YouTube, a lot of interesting high-FPS material can already be found. For now, some caveats apply though. To watch the clips at 60fps you currently need to use Chrome (further browser support is on the way) and be sure to select 720p60 or 1080p60 from the settings menu of the video player. A fair amount of decoding power is also required, so you will need good hardware. In addition, YouTube says that the content format will be only available on "motion-intense" videos, and the average cat video may not be detected as such. Of course gaming will be the most obvious genre that can take advantage of the higher frame rate.
This is Google favoring their own browser. There's nothing Mozilla can do about it.
If you don't like this attitude, don't use Chrome.
That bug report seemed to be somewhat inconclusive about where the trouble was (aside from the fact that it became visible in Chrome). At this point 'HW decoding' can mean Nvidia (probably several flavors/feature sets between GPU generations; but all under the same driver team), AMD (ditto), and at least two for Intel (the one that does decode assist in the GPU 'Pure Video' and the one that does it in an on-CPU fixed function block as the decode step of 'Quick Sync'), and probably a few of the Broadcomm decoders floating around. And that's just x86.
Is this a browser level bug that breaks across all drivers? A nasty interaction with certain drivers but not others? Hardware assisted video decode hasn't exactly been nailed down into the core x86 ISA yet.
This video crap should be the least of Mozilla's concerns for Firefox. Firefox's UI has been terribly broken since Firefox 4, and it has been getting worse with each new release. The slow performance and excessive memory usage problems that have been there for a decade now still aren't properly fixed, even if the Firefox devs will babble on about their microbenchmarks that suggest otherwise. These are the real problems that are driving users away from Firefox. They need to be fixed first.
I think Mozilla may privately be in panic mode, or should be if they aren't already.
Firefox is quickly sliding into irrelevance. It's down to around 10% or 11% of the market, with no sign of a reversal happening.
All of Mozilla's recent initiatives have failed. Australis was a disaster. Firefox OS has gotten tons of bad reviews, it's crippled compared to pretty much every other modern mobile OS, and it's unwanted by the general public. Persona was rejected, when not outright ignored. Rust has missed the boat by staying in development mode for so long (C++14, Swift and Go beat it to market). Firefox on Android is unremarkable, and they have no iOS presence. Nothing else they're working on sounds particularly appealing.
Mozilla needs to get back to making good products that people actually want to use. These pointless ventures involving stuff that users vocally despise clearly aren't working. I don't see Mozilla surviving as an organization if it has no users.