• douglasg14b@lemmy.world
      9·
      2 days ago

      Prioritization probably.

      They are busy keeping up with engineering teams 4x their size for their browser competition… (~500 engineers building Firefox vs ~2000 building chrome)

      Of a million potential features, you can only choose a subset to work on. This one was likely low impact and a low enough use case priority that it got regularly bumped under higher priority work.

      This is just the way… Well… Anything with limited resources works.

      Happy they finally got around for this.

    • sjohannes@programming.devEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      I don’t think the reason was technical. Firefox has supported WebM (a subset of Matroska) for 11 years, and whatever code they had probably would have been enough for most Matroska files, assuming the codecs are also supported.

      However, Matroska itself was only officially standardised last October despite being in use all these years. That was probably what convinced them to add support.

    • Shirogane Ryu@r.nfEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Probably now all or almost all of the videos on my PC are in MKV format. It’s codecs of that files well it’s a story for another day

    • CarrotsHaveEars@lemmy.ml
      4·
      2 days ago

      It’s more than important. It’s vital to me. I host TV series ripped from discs on my NAS through HTTP and play them back on another machine.

      For years I used an extension which sends the URL to VLC for playback via HTTP. Nowadays I got rid of the extension and just drag and drop. That doesn’t mark the link as clicked, though. It’s hard to track the progress this way.

      • 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        It feels like using a browser to play video always take wayyyy more resource than a video player. Sending a link to vlc seems like an optimal option to me.

        • CarrotsHaveEars@lemmy.ml
          1·
          2 days ago

          You are not wrong. However, how did MP4 get supported in the first place? Before 2010s, the expected user behaviour was still downloading an MP4 and play with a native player. Why the big gap between MP4 support and MKV support?

        • CarrotsHaveEars@lemmy.ml
          1·
          2 days ago

          Let’s just say there were times I opened the browser after a long day of work just to enjoy an episode or two to prevent mental breakdown.

        • Ferk@lemmy.ml
          0·
          2 days ago

          I wonder if this will help improve playback on Firefox when using Jellyfin. Maybe it will be able to play more directly and use less server resources, my NAS has relatively modest power.

            • Ferk@lemmy.ml
              21·
              2 days ago

              Oh, Jellyfin works, don’t get me wrong (and it has native apps too). But I welcome every little performance gain. The NAS already starts getting noisy even when it runs just simple docker images on idle… it can get a bit annoying.

              And, from what I heard, Plex tends to have a more resource-intensive idle state due to having more cloud-based features and background tasks.