How can I get H.264 support?

Question

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.

Answer 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:

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.

Answer 2

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

Or in a terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install x264

Answer 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

Answer 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

Answer 5

The following command worked for me:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0 ffmpeg

The MP4 video can be played now.