Only 360p on Youtube with HTML5

Question

I recently read that Firefox improved it's HTML5 video support, so I thought I gave it a go again, because I am not a fan of Flash. It works fairly well, but unfortunately the videos are limited to 360p only.

Are there any settings to be made or is this it?

Solution

Ok, a friend was also experiencing the same issue and this apparently helped:

1. Go to https://www.youtube.com/html5

2. Ensure MSE i.e. Media Source Extensions (required for MPEG-DASH i.e. adaptive streaming) and H.264/WebM are supported by your browser (^† see below for more). Also if you right click any video and select Stats for nerds you can see whether DASH is supported or not:

   

3. Click the Request the HTML5 player button:

   

4. Now you should see this and can try viewing videos at resolutions above 360p:

   

^† To enable MSE in Firefox go to about:config and ensure all of the following are set to True:

media.mediasource.enabled
media.mediasource.youtubeonly
media.mediasource.mp4.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.enabled
media.fragmented-mp4.exposed
media.fragmented-mp4.ffmpeg.enabled

(Actually even if either MP4 or WEBM is enabled that should suffice, but if one doesn't work try enabling the other.)

Comments

[Karan]

I just read this, but that article's quite old and I was just able to watch this video for example in 1080p via the HTML5 player in Firefox.

[Mokubai]

I have disabled Flash in Firefox and in general I can watch most videos in 720p, a good few show up as 1080 as well. What videos are you having trouble with? Have you tried any others?

[TomTom]

@Mokubai I don't have flash installed and all of the videos are 360p for me

[Karan]

@TomTom: 37.0.1, and no, I didn't change any settings. In fact I'm not even logged into YT.

[Karan]

Why do you need a codec pack for YouTube videos? Did you read the question? Such generic advice is hardly helpful.

[Karan]

No idea why this only affects some people though.

[TomTom]

Yes it looks quite a bit different for me. How can I enable the Media Source Extensions?

[TomTom]

I already figured it out. Linux.. It works now! Should I edit your answer?

[Karan]

Hmm, looks like we both edited it and there was a conflict so only one of the edits went through. Anyway the answer seems ok now.

[TomTom]

Yeah, but now all the options possibly necessary are mentioned!

[Karan]

Yup, and for the best I think. :)

[Tony Schwery]

The question is about getting HTML5 Youtube to work with Firefox.