How to play h264 encoded videos with Totem?

Question

I can play some mkv videos but some others can't play. Why? I don't want to install ubuntu-restricted-extras cause it brings Adobe Flash that has not been supported again and it is the old version. And it is not easy to uninstall.

Solution

You just have to install the gstreamer ugly plugins that includes the h264 codecs:

➜  ~  apt-cache show gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly | grep Gstreamer-Encoders
Gstreamer-Encoders: audio/AMR; audio/mpeg, mpegversion=(int)1, layer=(int){ 3, 2 };
video/x-h264, stream-format=(string){ avc, byte-stream },
alignment=(string)au, profile=(string){ high-4:4:4, high-4:2:2, high-10,
high, main, baseline, constrained-baseline, high-4:4:4-intra, high-4:2:2-intra, high-10-intra }

So, just run:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly

or

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

and it's done. You don't need to install anything else, nor use the ubuntu-restricted-extras package.

Comments

[Jason Southwell]

What do you mean it's not easy to uninstall? It is...

[obysr]

sorry my english is not good. I am an Indonesian. once I install adobe flash plugin, it can't be uninstalled properly. maybe it deny to be removed.

[doug]

h.264 decoding is done for gstreamer apps via the libav or ffmpeg plugins. Some older versions were unable to decode High 4:4:4 Predictive which has been the default for the real FFmpeg for some time. (though no longer the case for recent gst libav plugins. This may have been the orig. posters issue, may of not, hard to tell at this point..

[Braiam]

@doug weird, for 1.0 Gstreamer the gstreamer plugin page states support for the h264 high-4:4:4 and high-4:4:4-intra. Nothing about predictive :/.

[doug]

Braiam - your right - I went back & checked my old bug report on this. It was in 13.04 but only during the dev, at some point High 4:4:4 Predictive started working again, sorry about that.