What Is The Wild Fox Project?

The Wild Fox project ('Wild Fox', or Wx for short), is a project aimed at releasing builds of Firefox which include features the Firefox builds do not include, including AVC (h.264) support with HTML 5 video.

Why This Project?

The Firefox project has opted to exclude certain features due to software patents, patents which are only valid in a small number of countries, including the USA and South-Korea (Wikipedia link). This means that decisions have been made due to patents which do not apply in most parts of the world. The Wild Fox project aims to rectify this by releasing builds with these features included, builds which will of course only be available to those not in software patent-encumbered countries.

Developers Needed

As I (Maya Posch AKA 'Elledan') am just a single person, help is required to set up this project successfully and to release stable builds for as long as is required.

If you are familiar with the Mozilla source and/or C++ plus have at least passing familiarity with (multimedia) libraries, you are more than welcome to join the project. Please contact me either via SourceForge or via my personal site.

Current Developments

(Updated 2011/02/13)

An add-on is now available for regular Firefox builds which allows any video format to be played back in Firefox depending on the installed browser video plug-in:

The VLC plug-in works, but lacks controls for playback control.

The Windows Media Player 11 plug-in works, but can't have auto-playback of the video disabled.

At this point Linux & OS X probably have the better video playback plug-ins for browsers

You can download the add-on in XPI format from here. Do keep in mind that it's basically an Alpha build, and that I gladly welcome feedback to improve it :)

At this point the goal is to include at least AVC (h.264) support to the HTML 5 video tag. To this end the currently stable Firefox 3.6.3 source code is used and modified to include a decoder for AVC. Possible decoder libraries include Libavcodec which also offers the possibility of adding support for more video and audio codecs if required. There is also the option of using a generic codec framework like GStreamer, which allows for the use of codecs installed on the system.