7

A couple of days before, everything is working perfectly good. But After last Ubuntu update -also flash player has updated- (I just think that was occurred after update but maybe not) I can not watch 1080p, 480p and 240 videos in youtube. Actually there is no option just 360p and 720p. I tried to reinstall both Firefox and flash player but nothing change. I thing this problem just related with youtube. Because I can watch 1080p videos from vimeo.com and other websites. Please help me.

A picture from https://www.youtube.com/html5

al0s
  • 549
  • 2
  • 6
  • 16

3 Answers3

9

HTML5 is usually better than Flash (particularly security wise), just Youtube's implementation uses Media Source Extensions, which is available in Firefox but disabled by default currently (EDIT: in recent Firefox this should no longer be a issue (since version 44) - IF you have the appropiate codecs installed on your system):

To fix it, basically go to about:config and:

  • ignore the warranty dragons
  • set the media.mediasource.enabled & media.mediasource.webm.enabled entries to true

The YouTube HTML5 player enabling page should look at minimum like this:

working html5 player enabled screenshots
The more blue things the merrier

Then sit back and enjoy 1080p playback (if it doesn't need to buffer for half a hour due to broadband bandwidth like mine does :)

If you need to enable MSE & H264, you should be able to do so using the method suggested here in about:config:

  • Create a new boolean key called media.mediasource.ignore_codecs and set it to 'True' - it may now work so check https://www.youtube.com/html5
  • If it does not work yet, do the following:
    • Set media.mediasource.mp4.enabled to 'True'
    • Set to 'True' all the things begining with media.fragmented-mp4 - except for media.fragmented-mp4.use-blank-decoder which needs to be set to 'False':

All should then work (does for me with Firefox Beta AND ffmpeg available... for ffmpeg on 14.* releases try this question):

EDIT: In Firefox 43 at least, doing the above may break the HTML5 player. There seems to be other issues (atleast with Firefox's useragent), but anyway if it breaks try setting media.fragmented-mp4.gmp.enabled to false (source)

EDIT: again in Firefox 44 (with the default FF useragent) some issues may occur, though for me it shows a error about HTML5 videos when actually becuase videos have been blocked for other reasons (e.g. copyright). I am now forcing HTML5 with this addon Another edit: now doesn't seem necessary on fresh profiles, possibly due to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/44.0/releasenotes/#new

Wilf
  • 30,732
2

the problem is with the YouTube HTML5 player, I had the same problem and fixed at by installing flash plug-in. then go to this link and choose to disable the html5 player if it's still the default.

Afterwards, it should look like this:

enter image description here

Fabby
  • 35,017
1

It can also be caused by the lack of H.264 codec support on Firefox.

Installing the FFmpeg plugin for GStreamer solved this problem for me: 

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/gstffmpeg-keep
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
hg8
  • 13,582