About

I’m Alastor Wu, a staff software engineer working at Mozilla. I work on things related with media playback on Firefox. In my spare time, I do bouldering, writing music related articles and reviews as well as composing music.

Work Experience

Staff Software Engineer @ Mozilla, Portland, US

March 2023 - present
Brought HEVC playback to Firefox across Windows, macOS, and Linux
Added hardware video decoding (ffvpx) for VP9, AV1, and HEVC to improve playback performance and power usage
Added Matroska (MKV) container support for the most common audio and video codecs
Shipped new media web platform features — the Autoplay Policy Detection API, captureStream(), and CSS media-element pseudo-classes

Senior Software Engineer @ Mozilla, Portland, US

March 2020 - March 2023
Shipped system-wide media control via hardware media keys and the Media Session API across Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android
Built the foundation for Windows Media Foundation media-engine playback, enabling later DRM and HEVC support
Implemented seamless video looping, improving looping performance and unblocking Google Meet
Improved media playback performance and stability through better frame-drop handling and profiler instrumentation

Software Engineer @ Mozilla, Portland, US

July 2018 - March 2020
Implemented blocking autoplay to help reducing annoying autoplay video or ads
Improved Firefox WebVTT module to achieve the best WebVTT standardized support among different browsers
Improved WebRTC call CPU usage on MacOS by introducing a way to utilize hardware encoder

Software Engineer @ Mozilla, Taipei, Taiwan

Sep 2014 - Jan 2018
Analyzed and improved browser video performance cross different platforms
Designed the mechanism to postpone autoplay media in unvisited tabs
Implemented audio competing policy and media controller on Firefox Android
Implemented audio managing system on Firefox OS that controls if audio can start playing

Education

Jul 2012 - Jun 2014
Master, Multi-media Engineering in National Chiao Tung University
Jul 2008 - Jun 2012
Bachelor, Computer Science and Engineering in National Chiao Tung University