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Comment by rene_bg | Hacker News Reader

You can use [1] to force YouTube videos being streamed as H.264 instead of VP8/9. This helps with the battery issue (at least on YouTube).

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

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I think browser makers (or whoever it needs to be) should offer an option to save battery over a little bit of extra bandwidth. Maybe even make it the default.

youtube's logic selects the codec, not the browser

No, it’s a negotiation wherein the client submits its list of supported protocols and the server chooses between them.

And since FF supports both, it's YouTube which is choosing the codec, as the8472 wrote.

And what vim_coder and ConputerGuru meant was that Firefox would present a spoofed list of supported codecs to YouTube to force selection of the higher bandwidth, lower-powered codec.

Just because Firefox technically supports a format doesn't mean it has to disclose that format to external servers for selection.

Having custom behaviors for specific sites is a terrible practice. Browsers are complex enough as they are without an extra layer of hacks.

Who said anything about custom behavior for custom sites? A simple “on battery? X264/265 only” is what’s being discussed here.

That does not work because the browser that does not know how much it can reduce the presented feature-set without actually breaking the site. Some content is vpx-only.

It seems just about the same as having custom behaviors for specific user agents. Sadly, that's how things work these days.

Not if the browser only advertises support for the one it wants YouTube to pick.

Good to know, but at least for me actually occurs with MP4 files. I tried it on my own video MP4/H.264 files - loading the video with the video tag with plain HTML5. I am sure the FF devs know about the FF57 video bug and have fixed it already in nightly build or are working on it.

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