To display or stream a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos, Google’s video-sharing website YouTube uses Adobe (News – Alert) Flash Video and HTML5 technology. Reports indicate that the latter technology is on trial. However, to use HTML5-based videos, the browser must support HTML5 technology. The advantage here is that the user does not have to install or use Adobe Flash player.

Lately, Google (News – Alert) has added three new pieces of information to this page. Aside from informing you whether your browser supports HTML5 Video, H.264 and WebM VP8, it also supports Media Source (News – Alert) Extensions (MSE). In simple terms, MSE allows Web applications such as YouTube or Netflix to generate media streams for playback in JavaScript. According to technology news blog Ghacks’ founder Martin Brinkmann, “This makes way for new features such as adaptive streaming (for instance MPEG-DASH) or live streams, or to transfer encrypted contents to the user decode it using JavaScript, to play it in the browser afterwards.”


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Now, MSE is not supported by browsers like Firefox and Safari. Hence, if a user is using the HTML5 video player on YouTube (News – Alert) in Firefox, the user will notice that the browser does not give you the option to select 1080p or 480p video resolution no matter what, reports Ghacks. Well, if the user leaves HTML5 beta and returns to Adobe Flash player, the option to select 1080p becomes available.

The report indicates that Google recently switched to adaptive streaming on YouTube for 480p and 1080p videos by using MSE extensions. Since Firefox does not support the MSE feature yet, the option to switch to streams that make use of higher resolution videos becomes unavailable in the browser, wrote Brinkmann.

As per this blog, Mozilla (News – Alert) is planning to implement MSE extensions, but it is not yet when it will become available. The blog says that the progress on these two browsers can be monitored on the Bugzilla.