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Is there any way, at all, to play <video> with H.264 source in Firefox?

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  • Last reply by mattclough

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I am a developer working on a site that makes heavy use of video. The site navigation and video playback controls run together, so it's important for me to be able to have full control over the videos, however, the videos must be hosted on Vimeo. The information on Firefox support for H.264 is all over the map, though at this point, I am just assuming, for the sake of practicality, that Firefox doesn't support H.264 playback at all. If I can't find a good solution, we are simply going to draw the line at Firefox and not support the browser at all for this site. It would be nice for the site to work on Firefox, but we estimate that less than 6% of our viewers will be using the browser, so it won't be hard to just redirect them to a different browser. Is there any hack, any workaround, anything at all, that I can do to play H.264 video using just the good old standard

I am a developer working on a site that makes heavy use of video. The site navigation and video playback controls run together, so it's important for me to be able to have full control over the videos, however, the videos must be hosted on Vimeo. The information on Firefox support for H.264 is all over the map, though at this point, I am just assuming, for the sake of practicality, that Firefox doesn't support H.264 playback at all. If I can't find a good solution, we are simply going to draw the line at Firefox and not support the browser at all for this site. It would be nice for the site to work on Firefox, but we estimate that less than 6% of our viewers will be using the browser, so it won't be hard to just redirect them to a different browser. Is there any hack, any workaround, anything at all, that I can do to play H.264 video using just the good old standard <video> tag?

Chosen solution

hello mattclough, due to patent and licensing issues support for h.264 is not directly built into the browser, instead firefox relies of the capabilities of the operating system or hardware to playback such media content. this will work in windows vista/7/8, linux, android and firefox os devices - for details please refer to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Supported_media_formats

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Chosen Solution

hello mattclough, due to patent and licensing issues support for h.264 is not directly built into the browser, instead firefox relies of the capabilities of the operating system or hardware to playback such media content. this will work in windows vista/7/8, linux, android and firefox os devices - for details please refer to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Supported_media_formats

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Great. Thanks.