Hey there,
I’ve been using Firefox for ages now, and I was completely satisfied with it… until very recently, that is. For space-saving reasons, I started to convert my media library to H265, since all devices in my network support it now. Or so I thought. One very noticeable omission is my desktop PC with Firefox. Now, if I watch something from my local media server, the server has to waste resources to convert to H264, which is a noticeable performance hit to all other things running on the server. The GPU in my Desktop PC (or the CPU for that matter) could have displayed H265 without even changing clock speed from idle. So I tried to use the native Plex App for Windows for that, but that one does not support RTX Super Resolution which was really nice when watching old DVD stuff.
From what I can see, to get both, I need a Chromium browser. Since I would rather not have two browsers open all the time: Is there any browser based on the latest Chromium Builds that is not a massive insult to one’s privacy?
Firefox can display x265. Do you use the flatpak version? If so, create a bug report.
If not, search for enable x265 on firefox and install the codecs.
Whats the log in plex?
Holy… why the fuck would this be disabled? And why the fuck didn’t I find this information in the first place?!
To all wondering: change
media.wmf.hevc.enabled
To 1 in about:config, restart browser, done.
Thanks, mate
The reason is software patents and asinine licensing for HEVC. Thank the greedy fucks in suits for that.
also, that’s windows only
Supported for devices with hardware support (the range is the same as Edge) on Windows only. Enabled by default in Nightly and can be enabled via the media.wmf.hevc.enabled pref in about:config. 10-bit or higher colors are not supported.
royalties are really great, innit?
Long term you are probably better off converting to AV1 and sticking with Firefox, but I understand that your desktop GPU might not currently support AV1?
My GPU does, but many other devices in my Network don’t, so that would only shift the problem.
Have you considered converting to AV1 instead of H265?
I have a similar issue with my mac+chrome having to convert H265 -> H264 (even though it should be able to play it), but it has no trouble direct-playing AV1 for some reason.
The only Chromium I know which isn’t an insult to privacy is Vivaldi
Vivaldi is an ungoogled Chromium, there don’t go any data to Google, except if you use the optional Google Save Search in the privacy settings. OpenSource, well, Vivaldi isn’t strict OpenSource, because 5% of the script corresponding to the UI is proprietary, but full auditable and even accessible and moddeable by the user, in the forum they show how to do it (logically at own risk). There isn’t any privacy issue or hidden things in it. User data in a Mozilla-Firefox Account is shared with Alphabet, googleanalytics and google-tagmanager, in Vivaldi nothing is shared with Google or other companies.
How is the ad blocker? I use Brave at work for debugging frontend code, but I don’t really trust the org behind it. But I need something in the Chromium family to test our app, and the ad blocker is nice (main browser is Firefox).
If Vivaldi’s ad blocker is as good as Brave’s, I’ll switch. I’ll probably keep Chromium on my personal computers though (all Linux) because Vivaldi isn’t open source. I use it very rarely since Firefox meets my needs, so it’s less of an issue.
I use no other, the ad/trackerblocker in Vivaldi is full customizable, you can add the filterlists you want. In the adblock test I got between 90-100% (You must test the best filter combination, because too much can break some sites, adblocking is always a balance game). If you want more privacy, you can use the privacy extensions you want or use userscripts, which you can install directly as extension, if you don’t want to use Tamper-,Greasy- or Violentmonkey to do this. It’s a EU company (strict GDPR), no tracking, ads or third parties behind, own sync server e2ee.
Cool, I’m playing with it. One concern is that it’s closed source.
I’m not going to use it as a main browser most likely though, I’m happy with Firefox, but I need something for when websites refuse to work w/ it.
