14 DAY TRIAL // FFmpeg is present in most Linux distributions, so it's not really surprising that Mozilla finally decided to make an important change to Firefox and allow it to use the latest FFmpeg packages that are present in a system.
FFmpeg is a famous multimedia framework, and it's a solution that's become more and more popular. Most of the Linux distributions use and integrate it by default, or at least they provide the packages in the repositories. One of the biggest Linux OSes, Ubuntu, has recently moved from Libav to FFMpeg, so it's safe to say that most users have access to it.
This is a collection of libraries and various applications that provide support for playing any kind of multimedia data. It's not Linux-centric, and it can be found on both Linux and Windows. It's also available for pretty much all of the distributions, and it can be compiled from the source code. What's even better is that it's also available for various architectures, including X86, ARM, PowerPC, and so on.
Firefox to use FFmpeg by default
One of the bug entries for Firefox mentioned this all the way back in September, and now it has been implemented in the browser. The new feature is now available in Firefox 43 Beta, and it should be available soon for the stable branch as well.
"This bug will follow the work required to enable FFmpeg PDM by default (if ffmpeg is found to be available on the system). By default we only use libav 9 or FFmpeg 1.2 if found on the system. If media.fragmented-mp4.ffmpeg.enabled is set, will allow use of libav 0.7 and ffmpeg 0.8 or later," reads the bug entry.
Regular users should find the browser a little bit more responsive, but the feature is under the hood, and people won't be able to spot it visually.
Firefox 43 is expected to arrive on December 15, 2015.