Home / ubuntu / Questions / 114872
In Process
Chad--24216
Asked: 2012-03-22 10:52:58 +0800 CST

How can I get H.264 support?

  • 772

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.

html5

5 Answers

  1. 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.

    • 12

  2. 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
    • 8

  3. 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

    • 2

  4. 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
    • 1

  5. 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.

    • 0