Firefox extension for watching videos without the flash plugin. This extension has been featured by mozilla.
This extension has been discontinued since most websites has upgraded to HTML5 video player.
Fetch video source of flash based media and play the video directly with Firefox, without the use of the flash plug-in.
Works with Firefox for Desktop and Android.
Supported sites/embed video player
- ScreenWaveMedia
- HTML5
- FC2
- niconico
Due to some minor variations of providing the video by a same media provider (different version of there player, use of the embed tag) a few videos may not be detected.
** Usage ** By default the video are detected when a page load, you can disable this behavior in the preference pane and manually try to detect video by pressing ALT-w.
Why you may want to use this extension
- You experienced some lag or bad CPU performance using flash
- You only use flash to watch videos, and do not want to install a non-free packages on your linux station (this extension is released under the GPL)
Pro tips *To read MP4 videos you must install a media plugin like vlc-web-plugin or gecko-mplayer. Under Windows the vlc web plugin can be install when running the vlc install exe.
-
The video can be save with a "right click / save as" on the "open in a new tab" link.
-
Numerous options in the preference pane : select preferred format / quality when available, disable modules.
How does it works VWOF Fetchs the direct link to videos using regular expression, XPath, and DOM.
A picture and a select control are displayed (the "video selector). Clicking the video selector will open the video link into a video tag.
Each media provider is handled by a "parser". Javascript modules (.jsm) that are loaded at startup. The extension can fairly easy be extended due to it modular approache, as new media provider can be added by implementing a new jsm file.
Why a HTML5 parser ? For licensing reasons firefox did not support the H264 codec. By using the HTML5 parser, you can read the video if a media player plugin is installed as stated previously.
= Technical documentation for developers =
== How to write a new parser ==
Do not esitate to fork and add your own parser
-
Step 1 : Add the name of your parser without the .jsm ext in vwof.parser_name
-
Step 2 : Create a jsm file in the modules directory
The parser must respect the following API :
var parser = {
BASE_URI: 'example.com',
//called when the current page url domain name is this.BASE_URI
parse_site: function(cw) {
var video_info = [];
...
return video_info;
},
//called if other parser did not return video link with parse_site
//as it does not make sens to search embed video in a video site
parse_embed: function(cw) {
var video_info = [];
...
return video_info;
}
};=== video_info variable ===
video player is an array of hash
each video is an entry in the array and the hash contains video information
If the videos array contains more than one element a combo box (select tag) will be added in the player displaying the format and quality
video_info =
[
{
//DOM where the video selector / video tag will be embed
'player':,
//string link to the preview picture (or black background)
'video_img':,
videos =
[
{
//quality of the video (low, medium, hd720, hd1080)
'quality':,
//format of the video (webm, mp4, flv, ...)
'format':,
//direct link to the video
'url':
}
];
}
];