Forked from bug 1762125.

Reporter's about:support is here

From the last log the reporter provided, it showed that Firefox couldn't find the correct MFT for VPX (MF_E_TOPO_CODEC_NOT_FOUND, 0xC00D5212) and couldn't find the correct component for AV1 (WINCODEC_ERR_COMPONENTNOTFOUND, 0x88982F50).

(In reply to :alwu on the other bug)

But I suppose Chromium also uses MFT for VPX decoding, we would need to figure out why we couldn't find MFT on your system.

I know that Chromium implements at least AV1 directly as a D3D11 decoder as well as through WMF, and I think that's the case for VP9 as well. I think this issue is invalid unless there are plans to implement those decoders in Firefox as well.

We may want to implement some sort of pop up to notify users that they can install the media extensions, though.

Confirmed:

• VP9: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/media/gpu/vp9_decoder.cc
• AV1: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/media/gpu/av1_decoder.cc

Links to the Microsoft media extensions are:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/vp9-video-extensions/9n4d0msmp0pt
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/av1-video-extension/9mvzqvxjbq9v

Ah, thank you!

dragos, could you help me confirm that if installing these extensions (VP9 / AV1) helps your Firefox perform HW decoding?

Thank you for that solution. I can confirm that now I'm getting both VP9 and AV1 HW decoding in Nightly 101. I am even getting VP9 decoding in ESR 91.

It's worth noting that there have been two issues already where people were unaware they need install the AV1 Video Extension from the store:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/u17udy/installed_firefox_100_beta_and_av1_doesnt_seem_to/
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1762125

There'll probably be more support requests about this in the future without a way to indicate that people need to install them.

It would also probably be good to use the Windows Store link handler to open a small dialog to prompt to install the extensions for convenience for the end user:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/launch-resume/launch-store-app

An example link would be ms-windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9MVZQVXJBQ9V&mode=mini, which will open the AV1 Video Extensions store page in a small dialog with an option to "Get" the app.

Maybe we should consider to have this in recent upcoming versions, which can help more users to use hardware decoding.

Prompts may be considered intrusive but I'd absolutely show this information in about:support.

BTW, I've not noticed any settings in Firefox in regard to HW video decoding.

Would be nice to have something at least in about:config.

Rationale:

1. To avoid any possible problems with HW decoding which can be not as robust as the software one
2. To test e.g. system power consumption
3. To test how your CPU handles video decoding and if it's better than your GPU.

Would be nice to have something at least in about:config.

FYI, we have that already. In the about:config you posted before, you can see following information

"codecSupportInfo": "H264 SW\nH264 HW\nVP8 SW\nVP9 SW\nAV1 SW\nTheora SW\nAAC SW\nFLAC SW\nMP3 SW\nOpus SW\nVorbis SW\nWave SW"

VP9 SW doesn't says a lot especially considering when other applications offer HW encoding regardless ;-)

I meant showing something like: VP9: SW ⚠️ (where the alert emoji is clickable and it explains what's going on/missing).

Sounds like a good idea, NI :az who implemented the part of codec support information to see what she thinks.

It's definitely a good idea to get that information into about:support, but I would argue it doesn't solve the problem. Most users won't know to open about:support until they ask for help, by which point time has already been wasted troubleshooting. If a notification is shown the first time that a video of a certain codec is shown, then nobody will end up needing to create reddit posts or bugs.

As far as annoying factor, I feel like it wouldn't be an issue if it was shown once and then once dismissed was never shown again, but perhaps there's a better way to make users aware without opening a prompt, like an icon in the address bar?

(In reply to Zaggy1024 from comment #14)

It's definitely a good idea to get that information into about:support, but I would argue it doesn't solve the problem. Most users won't know to open about:support until they ask for help, by which point time has already been wasted troubleshooting. If a notification is shown the first time that a video of a certain codec is shown, then nobody will end up needing to create reddit posts or bugs.

As far as annoying factor, I feel like it wouldn't be an issue if it was shown once and then once dismissed was never shown again, but perhaps there's a better way to make users aware without opening a prompt, like an icon in the address bar?

Most people dismiss one time notifications and God forbid you show a popup window or anything.

Firefox has an option of notifying the user via a narrow yellow strip at the top of the browser - this could work. It's not intrusive and people would more likely to pay attention to it.

Adding a notification / additional info for this sounds like a good idea to me as well. Might be able to share code with bug 1766637 since that'll also involve informing the user regarding files needed to improve media playback.

I'm all for more details on the status of h/w decoding in the about:support page. LTSC doesn't have Store, so a Store link wouldn't do much for me and other users of this SKU, without any further details on what is actually missing/broken/happening (GPU/driver blacklist, missing media extensions, etc.).
In my case it was a combination of both driver version blacklisted and missing media extensions. I had to manually download those extensions and install them through PS. I was completely unaware that Firefox needs them.

I'm very in favor of doing this, discovering that https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1813339 was the cause of hw acceleration not working took me over 2 years. It's completely opaque to me, and I assume most users, that software from the Microsoft store would be necessary for hardware accelerated video decoding of any kind to work in firefox. The connection is not obvious to someone who doesn't know

1. Firefox relies on Windows media framework to do video decoding, which
2. requires additional software to do av9 decoding, which is the video codec of choice for the most popular video sharing website on the planet

We have built-in software decoding for both VP8/9 and AV1, so this is just about access to hardware features.

I don't see how we would know the underlying hardware supported hardware decoding before we prompt?

We should be able to detect support with ID3D11VideoDevice::GetVideoDecoderProfile like Chrome does here: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main:gpu/config/gpu_info.h;l=482;drc=0340dd86c6c1f01ccd1a0b983633cfef5fcf6697