How do I add MP3, MP4 and H.264 support to Chromium on Windows?

Question

Google Chrome on Windows comes with support for the above media formats, however, Chromium does not.

I want to add support for my own personal use, how can I do this?

I know that on Ubuntu this is solvable by installing the chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra and chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree packages, however I didn't find anything for Windows.

Solution 1

Google has little incentive to support H.264 when they have their own, competing WebM format that they are trying to push. (Haven’t you ever wondered why such a relatively unknown format is one of the formats the YouTube, a Google subsidiary, supports natively?)

Unfortunately, as you have learned, they re-structured Chromium so that you cannot easily drop in H.264 support as you could before. In fact, they have been planning on dropping support for H.264 altogether (even from Chrome) for a couple of years. They plan on switching completely to the WebM by providing WebM plugins for other browsers. (Hopefully they will continue to support JPG and PNG despite trying to push their WebP format.)

What you can try instead, is to use the Microsoft plugin that lets Chromium play H.264 through Windows Media Player. Because it is a plugin, it should still work—unless Google specifically blocked it.

Solution 2

I don't know how this is done, but Advanced Chrome fork does support MP3/MP4/H.264. Check it out!

Comments

[Savvas Radevic]

You have to copy avcodec*.dll files from Chrome installation to Chromium. downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/24/… -- I wonder if k-lite codec pack installation would fix this..

[nerdwaller]

@medigeek - Why is that a comment rather than an answer (assuming you have tested it and are confident it solves the problem)?

[Savvas Radevic]

You assume correctly, I don't have a windows pc at the moment :)

[nerdwaller]

@medigeek - Fair enough. The source seems legit - but fair enough :)

[Jay]

@medigeek - Looks like Chrome no longer uses those av*.dll files, since I'm not seeing them in the folder. Replacing ffmpegsumo.dll (the Chrome version is bigger) also doesn't make a difference.

[isaaclw]

I'm making this comment so that next time I come here I can hopefully notice the k-lite comment (instead of the solved answer below)...

[rustyx]

Hopefully they will continue to support JPG and PNG .... Haha, +1

[Emilian Manase]

Windows Media Player HTML5 Extension for Chrome This extension is deprecated and no longer available for download.

[Andy]

This is nice... they distibute pre-compiled binaries with no installer. Just unzip and run! Tested h264 support and it works out of the box.