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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, 2012 at 16:20
  • I investigated this issue as well. For Chrome h.264 is no problem as it is builtin by now, but Firefox has plans to support it via gstreamer see phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM5NzU. So with nightly build (8/Aug/2013) you should set the perference: media.gstreamer.enabled to true and install proper codecs for gstreamer. I have not tested this, as nightly build are very unstable.
    – math
    Aug 8, 2013 at 11:50

5 Answers 5

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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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    Will only work for chromium (chrome has it builtin by now) and not for Firefox.
    – math
    Aug 8, 2013 at 11:50
  • Then firefox should have been built properly and if it's a built-in in chrome (and you're using it), then you should be comfortable building chrome from sources or using a binary updater. Yossile's answer is equally correct for things that link against the library itself, but you can't have ffmpeg-extra without x264. That being so, my answer sort of subsumes his by being more general and including chromium as well. Aug 8, 2013 at 22:35
  • well, I didn't want to offend you or your answer, I just wanted to point out whats about Firefox in that case.
    – math
    Aug 12, 2013 at 10:29
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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. Mar 21, 2012 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? Mar 21, 2012 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, 2012 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? Dec 13, 2012 at 13:12
  • Just to make it clear, will not work for Firefox.
    – math
    Aug 8, 2013 at 11:51
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Right now, I'm using Firefox Nightly (27.0a1 (2013-10-24)) on Ubuntu 13.10. I made the change on the flag media.gstreamer.enabled to true. You also need to install the package gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg.

You can check if you have h.264 enabled in this page: http://www.youtube.com/html5

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In Ubuntu 14.04 the package gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg is not available anymore. See the bug report at launchpad.

Web Upd8 posted a workaround to install the gstreamer package using a ppa:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/trusty-media
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
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0

I need to play MP4, then I looked up, I found to type in the terminal the following line is giving the right answer: ($ apt-get install gstreamer1.0 ffmpeg) The video can be played, now.

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