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Get a warning when a video is not supported by Firefox ? (HEVC H265)

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  • Last reply by Skipwoof

Skipwoof
Skipwoof
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Hello

I was trying to figure out why the videos taken with my mobile phone couldn't be played via Firefox. After a while I realized that it was due to the format of the video: HEVC H265. This new format is handy because it's less heavy in disk space... but it's proprietary, so Firefox doesn't support it : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Formats/Video_codecs#HEVC

then my question is simple:

In order to save time for people like me who don't understand why we only hear the sound of a video, and why it stays black: is it possible to put a warning pop-up as soon as the browser detects this proprietary video format ?

Hello I was trying to figure out why the videos taken with my mobile phone couldn't be played via Firefox. After a while I realized that it was due to the format of the video: HEVC H265. This new format is handy because it's less heavy in disk space... but it's proprietary, so Firefox doesn't support it : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Formats/Video_codecs#HEVC then my question is simple: In order to save time for people like me who don't understand why we only hear the sound of a video, and why it stays black: is it possible to put a warning pop-up as soon as the browser detects this proprietary video format ?

Modified by Skipwoof

All Replies (4)

cor-el
cor-el
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You should see a warning in the Web Console if there is a problem with playing a media file.
It is always a good idea to inspect the Web Console is case something looks wrong (best is to hide CSS errors and other sections as Firefox shows a count when a section is hidden).

Skipwoof
Skipwoof Question owner
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Yes, this is how I led to identify the format issue (and dig in that way to understand what is the issue with the format of the video).

But all we have in the console is "Error : format is not supported". Screenshot : https://i.ibb.co/h8cDgkW/Capture.png

What I'm requesting is : To avoid users loosing time like me to (understand WHY there is an error reated to the format), is it possible for Firefox to popup a warning when it "try" reading an HEVC encoded video ?

cor-el
cor-el
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Firefox doesn't know details about unsupported formats and thus can't name this coding format. There are lot of container and codec formats, either behind licenses or hardly used that Firefox doesn't support. Showing a pop-up that need to be closed would be highly disruptive, so this only leaves the Console that has more room. There is usually a message in the player area when the video can't be played, but in this case Firefox might see a valid audio track and plays this instead.

Skipwoof
Skipwoof Question owner
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Exactly, we have only audio and black screen. But no message at all on player area. Instead of a pop-up, just a message in that player area should also be fine. How to add it ?