H.264 video support in Chromium, missing codec?

Question

Been using Chromium for a while, but it occurred to me that most video content does not work. YouTube does, but Vimeo does not, and most video streaming sites as well as random webpages with embedded video typically don't work either.

I have a few other browsers installed as well: Firefox, Brave, Google Chrome, Safari, Vivaldi, they all work fine everywhere. Chromium is the only exception.

For your reference I'm using macOS 10.15 (Catalina) and the latest versions of all browsers, and never installed any custom codecs or whatsoever.

According to html5test.com under multimedia, in the Video section, other browsers have H.264 support. And further down in Video codecs (under Streaming) they have MP4 with H.264 support as well. However Chromium doesn't.

Is there a way to get this working?

P.S. I installed Chromium with brew cask.

Solution

By default, Chromium does not support proprietary codecs (like h.264, aac). Official info: https://www.chromium.org/audio-video

So, on macOS, you need to compile Chromium with the proprietary codecs support yourself ; or download pre-compiled versions with the proprietary codecs support (https://chromium.woolyss.com/ - I am the admin of this website for many years).

Comments

[diegocr]

I need to bisect an issue in Google Chrome while streaming videos, but this is of course not possible using the default python's bisect tools and Chromium builds, by any chance have you considered providing this capability with your website's builds?