Microsoft added H.264 support in Firefox

It's no secret that Firefox does not know how to play H.264 encoded video by the encoder, and in the future this functionality is not planned. The reason is quite simple - Mozilla in the codec war for HTML5 video made a bet on the free VP8 (in WebM containers) from Google. But the network has a lot of video encoded in H.264 (flv5, mp4 format) and for its conversion to the new standard, not small computing capacities are needed. For such giants as google, this is certainly not such a big problem, but for small companies the transition to a new standard can cost a pretty penny. It was for such comrades that Microsoft tried (of course, not without profit for itself) - an add-on for the WindowsMediaPlayer plugin was released, which will allow Windows 7 users to watch H.264-video in Firefox.

So welcome - HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in

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The HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in is an addon that allows Firefox users to view H.264 videos on HTML5 pages using the built-in features of Windows 7. This extension allows the previously popular Windows Media Player Plug-in for Firefox to function on pages who use the HTML5 standard.

Supported Platforms
Requires Firefox 3.6 or latest Firefox 4.0 beta
Windows 7
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Links
Install addon
Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in Release Notes

License
A copy of the license agreement is available here (A copy will also be installed along with the addon)

Developer Notes
The extension is based on the add-on for Firefox which parses the HTML5 page and replaces the Video tags with a call to the Windows Media Player plug-in, thus allowing you to view the video in a browser. Addon replaces video tags only if the tag specifies the video format that is supported in
Windows Media Player. Tags with other video formats remain untouched.

In some cases, Firefox will not be able to play the video, even if the addon is installed correctly. This happens if the page uses the canPlayType call to determine if the browser supports H.264 video. Usually the check is done using createElement ('video') or getElementsByTagName ('video') and calling canPlayType ('video'mp4'). In both cases, the call will return an empty string even if the addon is installed and the browser can play out H.264 video.

The current version of the addon still uses the Windows Media Player Plugin API to control the player, so there are some differences between the methods / properties defined in the HTML5 standard and those available in the Windows Media Player plug-in.
We try to find a solution to these problems, if possible.
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