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Evan Kroske
Asked: 2010-08-09 12:01:05 +0800 CST

Watch QuickTime videos in the browser?

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It's rather frustrating to me that I can't watch any of the videos on Apple's site. Is there a QuickTime plugin for Chrome or Firefox, and if not, why?

plugins browser quicktime

4 Answers

  1. Odd... Works for me!

    I'm using the totem plugin which I thought shipped with Ubuntu. Have a look at about:plugins in the browser and see if you can see "QuickTime Plug-in 7.something"

    If you don't, check totem-mozilla is installed. Might be worth installing the ubuntu-restricted-extras package to make sure you've got the right codecs.

    Just searching synaptic, I also have libquicktime1 installed. It's a dependency of quicktime-utils so it might be worth installing that. It might just be something used for encoding to quicktime.

    Edit: you might also need gstreamer-plugins-bad for AAC audio.

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  2. The Quicktime codec, like most other non-free formats, is provided as part of the w32codecs package (or its 64-bit equivalent, w64codecs) by Medibuntu. The community documentation includes instructions for installing.

    Once the codecs are installed the standard media plugins for your browser should detect and handle them.

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  3. I've discovered that sometimes Apple actually detects which browser/OS you're using when it embeds videos on its site, and that can prevent QuickTime videos from playing even if you have the proper codecs and plugins installed. You can circumvent this in Firefox by changing your user agent string.

    You'll need the User Agent Switcher extension:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/

    And a user agent string that specifies a browser on Mac or Windows. There's a rather nice list of user agents here:
    http://techpatterns.com/forums/about304.html

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  4. All you need is to run the following from a Terminal window:

    sudo apt-get install gnome-mplayer gecko-mediaplayer
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