OpenH264 VS profiler

I've installed mpv but was unable to play any videos see this. Then I compiled and installed openh264 from github. Yet, I still have performance issues, video plays like a slide show..

The codecs are open source. Gstreamer. Ffmpeg. H264.

No, it is definitely using hardware acceleration on a number of platforms: https://github.com/cisco/openh264/tree/master/codec/encoder/core and https://github.com/cisco/openh264/tree/master/codec/decoder/core. However, the docs say it will fallback to C/C++. But I don't believe that's happening on popular platforms like x86, ARM, and Aarch64.

I found the extension but haven't been able to get it to work yet. It needs openh264 installed and I haven't been able to figure out where to put the binary for it yet, but if you figure it out let me know! Lol :D

If you had the media.gmp.decoder.enabled pref flipped to true, I might have guessed that Firefox updated the OpenH264 plugin and downgraded it. You could try replacing the library from one at https://github.com/cisco/openh264/releases/tag/v2.3.1. Go to about:support, open your profile directory, and find the gmp-gmpopenh264/1.8.1.2 folder. Replace the binary with the one from the linked github page. Restart Firefox.

Now that CISCO has released an Open Source H.264 Codec available on all major platforms what excuses does Blackmagic Design have left?

Outside of the hardware implementations, the other popular H.264 encoders are MainConcept (which I think Adobe licenses). There are a few others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding#Software_encoders. Cisco's OpenH264 is free, but last time I checked was limited in profile support. The repo claims "Max frame size is 36864 macro-blocks".

Probably your best bet is to use the Firefox Profiler once it starts hogging the CPU to try to see what it's doing. I'd be happy to take a look at the result although I don't have a lot of experience at diagnosing performance problems; hopefully the profile will make it obvious what's going on.

I tried using the https://profiler.firefox.com/ and running with:

You can try to reproduce while taking a profile using the Firefox profiler, then share it in the #perf:mozilla.org room on Mozilla's Matrix instance.

Run a profiling session for ~30 sec when you notice something is running slower than you expect, see https://profiler.firefox.com/. Share results here if you want help interpreting them.

Next time, send a SIGABRT to the main process (kill -6 $(pidof firefox)) and use the resulting backtrace (you will find a link to the crash report in about:crashes) to file a bug. A performance profile could be useful, but you'll need to know first what to capture. This seems like a graphics issue, so try the Graphics preset. Share a link to your report.

https://profiler.firefox.com will be useful if you can capture and share it to developers.

If you can reproduce it in safe mode and a clean profile, capture a performance profile using the clean profile while trying to load a problematic webpage, don't remove any information from it, and share it here (although it's typically not easy for users to analyse them), or file a bug with it attached.

Next time, capture a performance profile using the Graphics preset, and kill the browser by entering kill -6 $(pidof firefox) in a shell. This will create a bug report (unless debian disables the crash reporter) that would indicate where Firefox is stuck at. You might need to use an official build to get useful results.