We will support HEVC playback via Media Foundation transform (MFT).
HEVC playback will be supported via the Media Foundation Transform (MFT) and WMF decoder module will check if there is any avaliable MFT which can be used for HEVC then reports the support information.
HEVC playback can only be support on (1) users have purchased paid HEVC extension on their computer (SW decoding) (2) HEVC hardware decoding is available on users’ computer
For now, I’d like to only enable HEVC for the media engine playback, but keep the HEVC default off on the MFT. Because the media engine is an experimental feature, which is off by default, it’s fine to enable HEVC for that.
HEVC playback needs hardware decoding, and it currently only support on Windows. HEVC playback check would be run when the task is in the mda-gpu, which has the ability for hardware decoding. On other platforms, HEVC should not be supported.
I’m on GNU/Linux myself, and personally, I don’t use HEVC at all. I don’t even decode video in my browser most of the time. I’m usually using mpv with yt-dlp. Streaming services like YouTube, Facebook and Netflix don’t use HEVC to my knowledge (being AOM members and all), but I don’t use services that require me to enable DRM in my browser. I don’t know of a service that requires HEVC decoding support.
It’s possible Mozilla will support HEVC decoding on other operating systems in the future. Windows is just the easiest one to start with. It’s worth noting that Chrome’s HEVC hardware decoding support does not support Widevine, the DRM Netflix and other streaming services use. So you won’t see them adopting HEVC in browsers, at least.
The fact that this bug for macOS is a part of the
hevcmeta-bug indicates that Mozilla also wants to support HEVC decoding on macOS: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1839107Chrome supports HEVC decoding on GNU/Linux, so I don’t see any reason why Firefox wouldn’t too, eventually.
Speak for yourself. I am Linux user as well and use HEVC for everything. Most of the videos on my Jellyfin server are encoded for HEVC (both 1080P and 4K).
I use HEVC because it has significantly better compression than older codecs, and many modern devices have hardware decoding support for HEVC. My server also has Intel QuickSync which can transcode HEVC if needed.