VP9 WEBM video support in EDGE browser

Question

I see that EDGE claims VP9 codec support in the latest versions by enabling the VP9 in MSE in their browser configuration.

I tried doing that and still, it doesn't work and it throws an error saying this type of video file isn't supported.

I had launched the https://html5test.com/compare/browser/mybrowser.html URL in the EDGE browser and this says VP9 is not supported in the browser and in the same time youtube videos are streamed in WebM vp9 codec(used stats for nerds to check this).

I am using this in my HTML file

<video>
    <source src="http:/url/123.webm" type="video/webm"/>
</video>

Youtube's https://www.youtube.com/html5 claims that it can play MSE & WEBM vp9, and it is able to play vp9 videos, is there any difference in the way a request is served by the server for vp9 and MSE & vp9.

I am able to play the VP9 video in chrome and firefox without any issue. Thanks in advance for the help.

Answer 1

As of EdgeHTML 15.15063, WebM + VP9 is only supported when using MSE (Media Source Extensions). The tag you're using:

<video>
    <source src="http:/url/123.webm" type="video/webm"/>
</video>

is not using MSE. To do so, you need to create a MediaSource object in JavaScript and stream your video content into a SourceBuffer. One example that walks through this is in Microsoft's streaming player example:

To use the MSE API, follow these steps:

1. Define an HTML5 video element in the HTML section of a page.
2. Create a MediaSource object in JavaScript.
3. Create a virtual URL using createObjectURL with the MediaSource object as the source.
4. Assign the virtual URL to the video element's src property.
5. Create a SourceBuffer using addSourceBuffer, with the mime type of the video you're adding.
6. Get the video initialization segment from the media file online and add it to the SourceBuffer with appendBuffer.
7. Get the segments of video data from the media file, append them to the SourceBuffer with appendBuffer.
8. Call the play method on the video element.
9. Repeat step 7 until done.
10. Clean up.

According to this Edge platform issue, Microsoft only claims limited WebM + VP9 support, and this is unlikely to change without significant push from the community via the Windows 10 Feedback Hub and/or Microsoft Edge UserVoice.

Chrome and Firefox support WebM + VP9 without MSE, which is why it works in those browsers.