Thanks. I did all of that, and I can see that all the formats are checked in my Firefox now. The only question now I have is, how do I know which of these formats is my YouTube video currently playing in? (It does show the HTML5 player now).
FWIW after enabling MSE, playing a 4k video, and opening 'stats for nerds' and switching away and back to firefox (Iceweasel 31.6.0) on Debian jessie the browser locks up at 100% cpu usage.