The latest Firefox release has some issues

Aug 18, 2015 09:00 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla recently launched its new Firefox 40 browser and it brought many improvements for the Linux platform, but it also created some additional problems for Linux users. Here is how to enable full HD videos in YouTube after the adoption of the HTML5 video player by default.

The Linux users are now finally free to use YouTube and its HTML5 video player without having to make any modifications in about:config, but this also caused a small problem. It turns out that some Linux users of Firefox 40 can't access the full HD (1080p) versions of the videos. It turns out that not all the codecs are enabled by default, but that can be easily rectifiable.

It's not clear why Mozilla feels that this feature is not matured enough to be used in the latest Firefox version, but apparently it still needs a lot of work. The fact that users can forcibly enable it tells us that some problems might arise and that it's possible that some issues are still present. Just because things went smooth for us doesn't mean that it will happen for everyone.

Enabling full HD videos in Firefox is easy

You can check if your browser supports all the codecs for YouTube by checking the YouTube HTML5 Video Player website, which list everything supported on your PC. If you have a Linux systems and Firefox 40, it's likely that some of those codecs will have a red sign, meaning that they are not enabled. All you have to do is open about:config and make the following changes. Please make sure that you don't change anything else.

code
media.mediasource.enabled from false to true
media.mediasource.webm.enabled from false to true
media.mediasource.mp4.enabled from false to true
media.fragmented-mp4.use-blank-decoder from true to false
media.fragmented-mp4.* from false to true
Right click and create a new Bolean entry with the name "media.mediasource.ignore_codecs" and set it to true
This is pretty much it. Just restart Firefox and check the YouTube HTML5 Video Player website. Everything should be in the green. Enjoy!