firefox on ubuntu 14.04 does not play mp4 files

[tudor]

On xubuntu 14.04 the package gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg_0.10.13-5_amd64.deb is not available,
so I could not use mp4 h264 files in html5 tags. I used the .deb package from ubuntu 13.10 and after an apt-get -f install everything works fine.
I don't know why the gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg package is not available anymore, it looks like firefox could use gstreamer1.0-libav. I don't know if the h264 decoder is enabled in gstreamer1.0-libav package.

I hope that this bug report will help people get html5 video working.

Tested with firefox 25 and 29.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

The equivalent GStreamer 1.0 package to gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg is gst-libav1.0, which does have an enabled H.264 decoder. Ubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" has gst-libav1.0 1.0.10-1ubuntu1 and Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr" has gst-libav1.0 1.2.3-1.

GStreamer 0.10 H.264 support was first enabled by default on Linux in Firefox 26. On earlier Firefox versions you will need to go to about:config and toggle the media.gstreamer.enabled preference. However upstream Firefox has only just updated this support to GStreamer 1.0 and it wont be released until Firefox 30.0 (approx June 6th) - see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=806917

[tudor (tudor1)]

my previous solution does not work anymore.
Here is a new way of making it work:

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/multimedia/gst-ffmpeg.html

The Gstreamer 1.0 does not seem to be a solution for "normal" people, the necessary patches are not even accepted in firefox, there are no (known ?) backports of the patches for firefox 28 and on machines with less than ~6Gbytes of ram it is not even possible to compile firefox.

I understand that Debian has eliminated the gst-ffmpeg package, but Ubuntu has no reason to break something that works.
In the mean time, you can get it working in under 5 minutes thanks to linuxfromscratch.

[tudor (tudor1)]

Apart from development packages (like build-essential) you would also need:
sudo apt-get install libgstreamer0.10-dev
sudo apt-get install libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev
and maybe also:
sudo apt-get build-dep libgstreamer0.10-dev

[Full name (j-launchpad-d)]

Three months now. HTML5 video support is not exactly unimportant and this should be fixed.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

Firefox 30 has been released with support for GStreamer 1.0. It should be available in Ubuntu Precise, Saucy and Trusty in a day or two. Can you test with Firefox 30 and see if this bug is fixed?

[tudor (tudor1)]

firefox 30 build by ubuntu is ok, you can close the bug.
firefox images build directly by firefox will probably remain affected.

[auquicu (aebsbkrs)]

Just upgraded to trusty. there is no package "gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg":
# apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
Package gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg is not available, but is referred to by another package.

It is rumoured that one has to use libav nowadays. It would have been nice if the upgrade process had taken care of that.
# apt-get install gstreamer1.0-libav
But that doesnt help.

The previous comment suggest that firefox-30 might be needed.
# apt-get remove firefox
Removing firefox (29.0+build1-0ubuntu0.12.10.3) ...
# apt-get install firefox
Setting up firefox (32.0+build1-0ubuntu0.14.04.1) ...

Maybe the version is 32 now. But no mp4 videos are played. Maybe someone can publish a sequence of steps to follow
in order to get a trusty with firefox that plays mp4?

[auquicu (aebsbkrs)]

Answering my own question: all was well after

# apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras