Tag Archives: adobe flash

Force Flash Youtube video for Firefox 37+

Resolving problems, ,

There always has to be some crap that breaks my “comfy” zone when it comes to web browsing. Firefox 37 that was released not long ago extended the support for HTML5 video and Youtube kindly prefers HTML5 video over everything else.

Yes_HTML5

If only Youtube in HTML5 mode wouldn’t suck so badly. Firstly, switching windowed and fullscreen mode messes up window placement, that “Press Esc key to exit video” popup is annoying as hell, video quality keeps jumping all over the place because Youtube High Definition extension doesn’t work anymore and video quality is absolutely pathetic. I don’t know why, but apparently my GPU does no video processing for any of the HTML5 video and it looks all blocky, smeared and rubbish. And for some moronic reason, it even taxes my laptop more than Adobe Flash video. Why, I don’t know. It just does and it’s pissing me off.

How to force Youtube to use Adobe Flash video in Firefox 37 and later?

Type about:config into the URL bar and press ENTER. Search for these two settings (use search field above) :

media.fragmented-mp4.enabled
media.webm.enabled

And set both to FALSE. This will disable H.264 and WebM support for HTML5. You can check if that’s the case here. It should look like this after tweaking:

No_HTML5

ALTERNATE OPTION:

Go to: Firefox Add-ons page -> Plugins sidemenu

Select “OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems Inc” and set it to “Always Inactive”.

This apparently forces Youtube to fallback to Adobe Flash and this is somewhat easier than the above method.

And if you want to control how Youtube videos are played and in what quality, I highly recommend Youtube High Definition add-on.

It’s stupid that I have to hack my browser again like this, but Youtube in HTML5 mode is absolutely rubbish. If they think this is how they’ll break us from the Adobe Flash chains, they are dead wrong. I’m staying with Adobe Flash mode until they make HTML5 mode equal in every aspect. And for F sake Google, fix/improve the quality mode settings already. It’s the same rubbish useless nonsense the day I found Youtube. Which is a very long time ago…

Improve Adobe Flash performance

Resolving problems, , ,

Adobe Flash has a known (rather serious) problem with Protected Mode in Microsoft Windows Vista and above. It may cause anything from insane CPU usage, plugin crashing, locking up, very poor Flash performance in browser, Flash video lagging etc etc.

You can read more about it here:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Flash#Disabling_Protected_Mode_in_Flash_11.3

Solution?

You can do it manually as described in the link above or you can use the archive to do it faster.

Download the archive with mms.cfg files:

Drop appropriate mms.cfg file into:
– (Windows 32bit) C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash
– (Windows 64bit) C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash

Restart the browser.

This will make Adobe Flash content usable again and won’t work like total piece of garbage. I have no clue why Adobe is insisting on it when it causes more problems than it does any good. Granted, it makes it a bit less secure, but having potentially less secure opposed to unusable, makes it a rather easy decision. Stuff that was unusable and unplayable on my low end laptop now works like I’m using a high end Core i7 system. Try it out and you’ll see that it actually works. If not, you can always revert back…