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Background: I am a novice web programmer and frequently use different browsers to test for incompatibilities. I sometimes find myself easily distracted and am trying to block video sites such as youtube, twitch, vimeo, etc. I know I can use browser addons/extensions, host file rules, router rules (I'm the only one on this router, btw), etc to accomplish this, but I'm thinking of creating some code to automate blocking of online video loading, based on different times of the day, by a slightly more bypass-proof way. (Yes...sometimes I'm tempted to bypass my own blocks...and yes, I know that no way is completely bypass-proof, but I just want to make it a little harder on myself. I also think of this as a little challenge to myself as to whether or not I can even do this.)

I recently found out a way to block flash for most browsers by removing/renaming a dll file called "NPSW(some numbers here).dll" in

c:/windows/syswow64/macromed/flash

The built in flash in chrome can be disabled by removing the pepflashplayer.dll file in

c:/users/(name here)/appdata/local/google/chrome/application/(version number here)/pepperflash

After flash is disabled this way, Chrome changes from loading videos in flash to loading them in HTML5. The html5 video can be blocked in Chrome by removing/renaming the ffmpegsumo.dll file in

c:/users/(name here)/appdata/local/google/chrome/application/(version number here)

Btw, I found this out here: (https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/50978/disable-youtube-html5-player-in-chrome)

My question is whether or not firefox, internet explorer, safari, opera, etc. can have their html5 video disabled. So, chrome has the one dll file to disable its html5 video decoding. Does firefox, internet explorer, etc, have a file that I can remove/rename to accomplish the same thing? I can't seem to find this info out by my own google attempts. What I did find about firefox is that html5 videos can be disabled through a change in the about:config, but I'm asking about whether or not a file exists that I can remove/rename to disable html5 video.

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  • I realize this might not be a solution to your problem, but I found your question while trying to solve the problem of auto-playing videos, so I thought I'd direct others like me to my answer (for Firefox): superuser.com/a/1370087/36197
    – Andreas
    Oct 25, 2018 at 21:50

1 Answer 1

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How to disable Video in FF

In the comments for this enhancement request there is a suggestion (comment 5 at 2012-03-13 15:57:41) to set media.webm.enabled, media.ogg.enabled and media.wave.enabled to false in order to
"render <video> and <audio> elements unable to play anything."

All these options are readily available if you enter about:config in the address box, and then enter media. in the filter box. In my testing (Firefox 10.0.1 on Gentoo) it was not necessary to restart Firefox, the elements were disabled when I reloaded the page.

This page was useful for my tests. The video there is disabled when both media.webm.enabled and media.ogg.enabled are set to false, as there is fallback from one to the other.

Source

How to disable HTML5 in IE

Adding a site to the compatabiltiy sites list disables HTML5 on that site.

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  • Thanks for the response. I did mention that I also had found this, but I am looking for removing or renaming a file to disable html5 video decoding. That way, I can much more easily automate the process.
    – train
    Sep 21, 2014 at 21:45
  • You mentioned about:config but without details...
    – Jan
    Sep 21, 2014 at 21:49

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