Hi!
I have a very old HW and need to disable VP9 video in Youtube (on Linux).
There’s absolutely no way to say add a GPU etc to add VP9 HW decoding support (the best video decoding it supports is h264).
Already set all of below to false and restarted Tor, but Youtube still plays VP09 video stream:
media.mediasource.vp9.enabled → false
media.mediasource.webm.enabled → false
media.av1.enabled → false
Tried most recent version of enhanced-h264ify plugin - its completely missing “Preferences” tab, i.e. clearly doesn’t work (b/c of Javascript?).
enhanced-h264ify does work in Mozilla for the same Youtube video and gives h264 stream in Mozilla.
I know Youtube limits h264 to about 1080p (or lower), this is fine.
Thank you.
Changing configuration in about:config and installing add-ons in Tor Borwser is strongly discouraged, because it makes way easier to identify and track you.
Now, about your question - I don’t know how you could disable VP9, but I hav a workaround. You could use yt-dlp to download the video in the format you prefer (see the --format option) and then reproduce it locally. Additional benefits include avoiding ads and preventing useless YouTube Javascript from draining your resources.
Yes.
To do so, you’ll need to install tor (little-t-tor, not Tor Browser). It automatically enables a local socks5 Tor proxy on port 9050 (that you can configure or restrict access to by editing the torrc file).
After that, you can just run yt-dlp with --proxy socks5://127.0.0.1:9050 option to make it connect over your new Tor proxy. To do so automatically whenever you run yt-dlp, you can add this line in the config file of yt-dlp (usually ~/yt-dlp/config):