Backport Bugzilla 1436226 Hardcode VP8/VP9

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1436226

we should also remove/revisit setting prefs like media.benchmark.vp9.threshold now that capabilities are hardcoded

also note emphasis mine

It may call IsV9Forced but that requires user disabling media.mediasource.vp9.enabled, which the Tor browser can lock to true on Desktop, but on Android things are different.

cc @pierov

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marked this issue as related to #42241

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changed title from backport 1436226 Hardcode VP8/VP9 to Backport 1436226 Hardcode VP8/VP9

changed title from Backport 1436226 Hardcode VP8/VP9 to Backport Bugzilla 1436226 Hardcode VP8/VP9

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Grr, Android.

But first of all, I'd lower this from Next to Backlog because this has just been pushed upstream. I think we can let it bake a little bit in FF nightly.

Then, Android.

Android has built-in support since Android 4.4+, we target 5+.
As for hardware support, here's a list of the first SoCs that supported VP9 in-hardware. It's mostly chip that came out between 2014 and 2016.

So, my preference would be for force-enabling it. I don't know how usable software decoding is... I can try on my old Oneplus One, which has a Snapdragon 810, the latest "high-end" Snapdragon not to support VP9 in hardware... I don't know if low-end and medium-end devices that were released a long time ago can still run Tor Browser as a matter of fact.

FWIW, I think the 1080p playback for Tears of steel encoded by Wikipedia (you need to scroll for the various transcodings) works very well on my old device, even though it's software decoding (as far as I can tell).

4k was very bad though.

So since RFP is for TB, does the patch upstream do what we want for android?

Judging from what @fkilic said it seems so (thanks!)

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@pierov is there work here for 14.0 stable ?

The patch seems low-risk, so we can cherry-pick it.

Removed Desktop as this is mostly for Android if I understand correctly, but at the end of the day it's acting on All Platforms.

We don't have tests for this patch, but I guess we can use my video tests to be sure VP8 stays playable.

Maybe a test would be to re-encode all the videos to include a text with the codec they're using.

The upstream commit is 0d849e343fdc28befe3eda59ef25b4f3f9c0a534.

The backport has a couple of conflicts because GetOwner() has become GetOwnerWindow().

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assigned to @pierov

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mentioned in merge request !1254 (merged)

marked this issue as related to tor-browser-build#41272 (closed)

marked this issue as related to tor-browser-build#41263 (closed)

closed

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