15.04 without restricted addonsĪs you can see in this screenshot the OpenH264 plugin is enabled, there is no Flash plugin, a few GStreamer packages in different versions are preinstalled but the video does not play! Instead the site immediately tells us that the video can't be played.

14.04.2 with restricted addonsĪs you can see in this screenshot only the OpenH264 plugin is enabled in Firefox, all the necessary GStreamer packages in different versions are preinstalled and the video plays as expected. Whenever I made some changes in the test, like installing a package or enabling/disabling something in Firefox I closed and launched Firefox again. I chose Vimeo, because they say they default to HTML5 and they don't seem to support WebM, which I consider not to be a good thing. Since YouTube also offers their open sourced WebM formats and I wanted to avoid going into to much detail about test methods I needed to use another HTML5 capable site to test proprietary H.264 playback support.

Ubuntu 15.04 without restricted addons installed during installationĪfter the installation of both VMs was completed I booted the systems, updated them again, installed VM guest additions, started Firefox for the first time and rebooted for the actual testing.

Ubuntu 14.04.2 with restricted addons installed during installation.

My guess was that only installing an H.264 decoder binary wouldn't be enough, so I set up 2 new virtual machines: Not directly related but if you prefer to automatically delete cookies when Firefox gets closed and can't find the right cookie to keep for persistent HTML5 playback then I suggest to install YouTube ALL HTML5. While this is indeed a very convenient solution it should also raise privacy and security concerns when software automatically downloads binaries from sites affiliated with Cisco Systems or other companies, no matter how transparent the process and license agreement is. That sounds great, doesn't it? Wait… that was a pun. To enable this plugin Firefox will now automatically download a binary from the OpenH264 website the first time you start the program. Mozilla added support for OpenH264 as a plugin in Firefox 33. So in the meantime you can install the gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg from saucy for your appropriate architecture here : The reason for this is the package gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg has been replaced by gstreamer1.0-libav but Firefox is planning to support gstreamer 1.0 only with version 30. The solutions above are not working anymore with Trusty Tahr 14.04. sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras Just visited the HTML5 Youtube test and I have H.264 checked you probably will need to install Ubuntu restricted extras to get the gstreamer codecs.

Openh264 video codec