Those of you who use Firefox to visit YouTube may have noticed that the website limits video resolutions.
In particular, any video resolution higher than 720p is not available. Other resolutions are available without a problem and thus videos at 144p, 240p or 480p are displayed without problems.
It doesn't matter so much whether you use Adobe Flash Player to watch videos or whether YouTube's HTML5 video player is used: the options are limited, usually at 360p and 720p, and all other resolutions seem to be absent from the selection menu.
This is a problem for someone who wants to watch a video and is forced to switch browsers to be able to watch YouTube videos in higher resolutions. Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer have no restrictions on video resolutions.
What can I do?
What many Firefox users don't know is that it's possible to configure the browser to display all the resolutions that YouTube offers.
Right now, of course, the feature will have to be configured, but soon that won't be necessary anymore, as the Mozilla Foundation will enable it by default for all users.
- Go to the address: about:config and press enter.
- Confirm that you will be careful when the window appears.
- Search for the term: media.mediasource.enabled. The value is set by default to: false.
- Double-click the value name and set it to true. Enable it.
- You may need to restart your browser.
If you visit YouTube now and click on the gear icon that shows video quality, you will see all available video resolutions displayed, without a problem
Note: If you have Adobe Flash installed, you may need to switch to YouTube's HTML5 player. To do this, you can go to https://www.youtube.com/html5 and click on “Request the HMTL5 player.”
From Firefox version 33 onwards, the button no longer appears, as Mozilla will use HTML5 by default, instead of the Adobe Flash it currently uses.
