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Canonical Limited is shown as a licensee of H.264. I am interested in being able to play H.264 video online when using the Chrome web-browser in Ubuntu (and in the future on Firefox when Firefox supports H.264).

Is H.264 support enabled on self-installs of Ubuntu? If not, is there some way I can buy H.264 support for my Ubuntu install? Assume a scenario where I self-installed Ubuntu on a computer that came pre-installed with Windows OS. I'd like to know any and all options available to me for getting H.264 to work on Ubuntu.

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Have you resolved this issue? – pl1nk Jun 25 '12 at 16:20

3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

The ubuntu-restricted-extras has all the multimedia decoding packages in and working for me on the decoding end. And chromium automatically used the ffmpeg plug-in.

If there are packages in restricted-extras you are sure you don't want you could try just
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra from the Software Center:

Install via the software center

Or in Terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra

Just to be sure it makes it in to chromium and you don't just get the codec.

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up vote 3 down vote

You can get H.264 encoder by installing the x264 package with the Software Center:

Install via the software center

Or in a terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install x264
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Definitely correct for getting h264 decoding installed, I'm just unsure whether it will get it in to chromium by itself. – Call me V Mar 21 '12 at 19:30
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Chrome (as opposed to chromium) support H.264. So assuming x264 package installs H.264 support, this should be it. Would "buying" a commercial H.264 support package give any advantages over installing the x264 package? – Chad--24216 Mar 21 '12 at 20:03
@Chad--24216 I believe differences are in licensing so that if someone needs it for purposes outside of the GNU-GPL it requires the commercial version. – yossile Mar 21 '12 at 20:18
Normally one has to pay royalties for a h264 license because she wants to distribute a video commercially, and not for decoding it for playback, as far as I know. Why would you want to use another codec? Lower CPU usage? – franzlorenzon Dec 13 '12 at 13:12
up vote 0 down vote

Firefox does not support h.264 yet.

try Google: firefox html5 h.264

but ... there is experimental plugin - see http://wildfox.sourceforge.net/

(I didn't try it)

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