Comment 476 for bug 412647

"5. Given the Ubuntu commitment to free software, do we really want to enable support for other codecs other than the officially supported free ones?"

building with gstreamer does not in itself allow firefox to play h264. it means that firefox can use the gstreamer codecs that you can install. this work equivient to rhythmbox, banshee, totem etc, where codec support is expandable by installing new gstreamer codecs.

If there is a desire to prevent firefox supporting non-free formats then its plugin support would need to be disabled so that it can't use flash or realplayer.