video-without-flash
===================

Firefox extension for watching videos without the Flash plugin.

Fetch video source of flash based media and play the video directly with
Firefox, without the use of the flash plug-in.

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.

Supported sites/embed video players:

 * Blip
 * Dailymotion
 * FC2
 * HTML5
 * NicoNico
 * ScreenWaveMedia

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.

How does it works
-----------------

This extension fetch the direct link to videos using regular expression,
XPath, and DOM. When available,  a picture and a select control are
displayed to read the video with firefox, using the firefox internal HTML5
compliant media player or a plugin like vlc or mplayer if the user had
installed it.

Why a HTML5 parser?
-------------------

For licensing reasons firefox do not support at the moment the H264 codec,
although it may change in the future. If a site uses HTML5 to display a
video, but the video itself is encoded with H264 or a variant you normally
wont be able to play it. By using the HTML5 parser, you can read the video
if a media player plugin is installed as stated previously.


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 or Right Click and "Watch video without flash".


Pro tips
--------

 * To view 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.

