Firefox 3.6 gets full screen native video

By Percy Cabello

Current Firefox 3.6 pre-beta 1 nightlies now feature a full screen option for videos embedded using the <video> tag like the natively supported Theora encoders.

Just right click on the video and select Full Screen. While on full screen, press Esc to return to the normal view.

There’s still a half second pause while switching modes that should be ironed in the next days, but is far better than the current Full Screen extension which forced a full video restart when switching modes.Neat!

Video full screen menu

Posted on October 2, 2009 - 10:56 am || More on Firefox 3.6, News

Comments

Jens

October 6, 2009 10:56 am

Is that still painted using the Canvas? Not everyone has super-duper-state-of-the-art CPUs …

Reply

EP

October 8, 2009 10:56 am

gee, Jens what kind of computer are you using?

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Jens

October 9, 2009 10:56 am

# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 47
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 2010.270
cache size : 512 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good nopl pni lahf_lm
bogomips : 4020.54
TLB size : 1024 4K pages
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc

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El Guru

October 9, 2009 10:56 am

I thought this was suppose to part of Firefox 3.5, or was that video control?

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fred

October 9, 2009 10:56 am

Forget the video and any other features until the issue with load times is resolved!

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Mohan

October 11, 2009 10:56 am

Cool, but I have yet to see web site implement this.

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JonNovember 1st, 2009 at 10:40 am

Archive.org uses the tag now. Pretty nice.

Reply

Firefox 3.6b1 Released! « The Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog

October 30, 2009 10:56 am

[...] native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster [...]

zak

October 31, 2009 10:56 am

Gimme back the close last tab function!
The new tab button is also unnecessary, I’m used to double click on tabs bar, but it can be here.
Just give us back the possibility of closing last open tab, like it was in 3.0 series

Reply

RyanNovember 1st, 2009 at 2:30 pm

wtf are you talking about zak? Ctrl + Shift + T

its still there just as it always ways

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Patrick-Emmanuel Boulanger-Nadeau

November 2, 2009 10:56 am

I’ve just tried the new fullscreen video option from small ogv files (320×240 up to 640×480) and I get less than 5 fps in fullscreen mode (2560×1600 on the main monitor, dual monitor).

Anyway we can help fix this ?

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Paul HaddenDecember 23rd, 2009 at 6:23 pm

Has anyone ever tried to broadcast a live event using FF video player? If so I would love the opportunity to discuss.

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sporange

November 3, 2009 10:56 am

Patrick-Emmanuel, it’s easy. Just roll up your sleeves and implement hardware acceleration in Gecko ;)

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macbirdie

November 3, 2009 10:56 am

Does this full screen video prevent screen saver / display sleep / computer sleep?

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Jens

November 4, 2009 10:56 am

Hardware accel? Just use the existing DirectSomething APIs. There should even be wrappers that work on both Linux and Windows.

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Vladron

November 6, 2009 10:56 am

Movies on Archive.org are working correctly only in full screen. In window mode they stop playing.

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david

November 6, 2009 10:56 am

not sure if works on subtitles

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DragonRosesCCNovember 19th, 2009 at 4:39 am

do you know of how to use english subtitles on a spanish or french only movie? I find a few movies i really wanna see but their don’t have english subtitles in them. i think i have seen a site or two that say you can download them but IDK how to put them in.

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Tri Nugraha Ramadhani

November 7, 2009 10:56 am

Is It The Best or Bad ???

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Midna

November 8, 2009 10:56 am

Wouldn’t the video lose it quality and be fuzzy? Embedded videos are often small, so making them full screen will stretch the video, plus lose it quality, especially those who have large screens. So, this isn’t the best idea, unless there is something I don’t know about. Better yet, why not have an option to select a resolution for the video when making it larger.

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david

November 9, 2009 10:56 am

it was very very and i am not sure yet

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Midna

November 9, 2009 10:56 am

Overall, I think it’s a good idea.

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Tom

November 10, 2009 10:56 am

Could you provide a button for the page with the video, rather than need to right click?

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Matthew Krick

November 10, 2009 10:56 am

It’s nifty, but when used with dual monitors the video pops up on the primary screen instead of the screen where the browser is.

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DragonRosesCCNovember 19th, 2009 at 4:42 am

i think that is something with windows. cause if you move that broswer over to your sec. monitor then close it there. then you open your browser it opens there (the last place it was) at least it does it to me in Win XP.
Hope that answered your question.

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WulfTheSaxon

November 11, 2009 10:56 am

The fullscreen feature could use a button…

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maacruz

November 14, 2009 10:56 am

Unfortunately, this is even far slower than flash 10 on linux at least. Useless till acceleration is added.

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steamed

November 15, 2009 10:56 am

fire fox crashes when u are watching vids (streaming) it always crushes after a while if am using full screen

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DragonRosesCCNovember 19th, 2009 at 4:45 am

i noticed this too. it’s really upsetting! some sites don’t allow resume. so i have to wait till the entire video downloads and watch it all again. thats when i give up!
I think FireFox should have codecs plugin at least for us that will use this as media player. or does it already?

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smithy

November 16, 2009 10:56 am

i fond full screen kept dropping out and had a lot off pop ups witch did’nt help ether

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Theeo123

November 28, 2009 10:56 am

I’m on a 10+ year old IBM thinkpad T40
it has an Intel Pentium (1) Moblie CPU at 1500 Mhz and just under 512Mb ram (a few mb get shared to the vid card)

for me the vids run fine, no more or less choppy that your average youtube vid with the HQ button checked.

Reply

R2

December 7, 2009 10:56 am

I get choppy picture with Full Screen on every computer I have tried
Two of the computers I have tried:
1)AMD 64bit 1.6ghz
1gb RAM
256MB ATI video card
Takes 100% of the CPU processing
2) Centrino CORE 2 DUO 2.26ghz
1gb RAM
Takes 30-70% of CPU processing and still a choppy pictured

note: videos play normally and without any problems when they are in their original size

I’m using FIREFOX 3.6 “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2b4) Gecko/20091124 Firefox/3.6b4″

This needs to be improved, Youtube plays HD videos on full screen and only takes 20-30% of the CPU with the video playing smoothly.

Reply

R2

December 7, 2009 10:56 am

If you want Mozilla to take care of the Choppy video issue, vote for the Bug :
Bug 523492 – Ogg video playback in Full screen is very choppy
Link:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523492

Reply

abhijith raj

December 26, 2009 10:56 am

very fast, i can watch in fullscreen.

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Jeff Byer

December 31, 2009 10:56 am

Aside from the delay in switching between full screen and normal mode, it looks to be working as expected.

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david

January 2, 2010 10:56 am

worth try

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no worries mate

January 8, 2010 10:56 am

Pentium 4, 3.2 GHz. Radeon HD 3850. 1 GB of RAM.

Small size: watchable but not enjoyable.
Fullscreen: absolutely terrible, the sound is even skipping back and forth in time.

If it’s not going to be faster than Flash I don’t see the point. Open or not, no one is going to want to make a switch if it ends up being worse and there’s a sizable chunk of people on the internet that want to watch videos that do not have a top performing gaming machine for surfing the web.

Reply

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