These concerns led Mozilla to change its policy in March and start work on providing H.264 support in Firefox. The group is sidestepping the licensing concerns by taking advantage of the system frameworks provided on Android that expose the hardware accelerated H.264 features. By leaving the decoding up to the hardware, Mozilla also leaves the license costs up to the hardware suppliers.Desktops versions of Firefox will also receive H.264 support. Windows Vista, 7 and 8 versions of Firefox will receive it using Media Foundation, Linux distros via GStreamer, and OS X through AV Foundation.
The result? H.264 in Firefox on Android just works, though support is currently limited on pre-Android 4.1 devices due to bugs. Mozilla plans to enable support for Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and 3.x (Honeycomb) devices in due course.
Firefox for Android now has H.264 support
Posted on Friday, November 30 2012 @ 14:23 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck