New features for HTML5 video playback in Firefox

As explained in this blog post by Jared Wein of the Firefox team there are quite a few new features in Firefox when it comes to playing HTML5 video. As an Aurora user, I am most excited about the option to go full-screen, the ability to overlay video statistics and to save a snapshot of the current frame as a JPG. You can see me talking about and showing them in this short video:

Firefox has a few features up its sleeve when it comes to HTML5 video playback you might not be aware of:

  • Firefox‘s seeking is now accurate to millisecondsmicroseconds, there is visual feedback when the video has stalled and clicking the whole video pauses and plays it
  • Firefox Beta has specialised controls when you watch video on small devices and watching HTML5 video shows a pleasing background rather than a brutal grey
  • Firefox Aurora has fullscreen, statistics overlay, saving of snapshots and controls appearing when the video ended
  • Firefox Nightly has a full-screen button, fading video controls after 2 seconds of non-interaction, no loading throbber on audio, error reporting when a video could not be loaded on the video, loop attribute support, and resizing of videos larger than the browser window when you watch them directly

Planned features for Firefox are an overlay play button like YouTube when the video is not set to autoplay and turning off screensavers during fullscreen playback.

Check out Jared’s post for more information.

About Chris Heilmann

Evangelist for HTML5 and open web. Let's fix this!

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8 comments

  1. Raphael Troncy

    Firefox Nightly has also a wonderful feature: a partial support of Media Fragment URI (see the spec at [1] and the announcement at [2] from Chris Double, or the demo at [3]).

    Raphaël

    [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/
    [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-media-fragment/2011Nov/0017.html
    [3] http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/mediafrag/

    December 16th, 2011 at 08:55

  2. Style Thing

    you rock!

    December 16th, 2011 at 10:55

  3. Gustaff Weldon

    Has the dependency of video controls on JavaScript availability been removed? Would user be able to start playing the video without JS?

    December 16th, 2011 at 11:12

    1. nemo

      Hasn’t, tested in Nightly with NoScript Kind of annoying for sure to have to right click on the video to play/pause…
      And of course the hide/show controls is just confusing then.

      December 16th, 2011 at 14:53

  4. nathan

    When I dont want to watch whole video i usually use “stop download” feature to save bandwidth (available for youtube videos).
    Would be awesome if we had this feature for html5 vids. It doesnt seem too hard to implement.

    December 16th, 2011 at 20:00

    1. Raphael Troncy

      This is what the Media Fragments URI enable you to do among many other things. Have you look at the spec? http://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/

      December 19th, 2011 at 02:55

  5. Caspy7

    I’m confused. As far as I know the option to go Full-screen (from the context menu) is in the current release (and has been for some time). Is this new to the Mac?

    December 17th, 2011 at 02:00

    1. Olly Hodgson

      While the right-click option to go fullscreen has been there for a while, there has been no button on the controls, and no javascript API to let custom controls do it. That’s the new bit.

      December 19th, 2011 at 05:06

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