If you thought MPEG was just a file format, you would be wrong. It turns out that MPEG is short for Moving Picture Experts Group, and it means that there is big business behind the use of these MPEG files.
There are now some nonprofit groups coming along to offer an alternative to the big name video codec giants of the industry. Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is one that creates the open, royalty-free video coding format called AOMedia Video 1 (AV1).
AOMedia has grown large enough now not just because of its brilliance but also because it was founded by some of the biggest names in the industry, including Amazon and Google itself. Now starting from Mozilla Firefox 63, there is now an experimental flag option from the Firefox “about:config” page to allow decoding of files with the AV1 video codec.
This tutorial demonstrates how to enable and disable the AV1 video codec support when you’re using a version of the Firefox web browser starting from Chrome 69.
How to Enable and Disable AV1 Video Codec Support in Firefox
1. Open the Firefox web browser.
2. In the address bar at the top of the window, type about:config and press “Enter.”
3. Click on the “I accept the risk” button when you get the notification about potentially voiding the warranty.
4. Copy and paste the media.av1.enabled into the search box (one beneath the address bar).
5. You’ll now see the media.av1.enabled setting show up in the window with the current value set to “false.” Double-click on it and the false value changes to “true.”
6. You can double-click on the same media.av1.enabled setting to turn it off again in the future if you like.
That’s all.