Debian – H.264 support in Firefox (Iceweasel) 24

debianfirefoxiceweaselvideovideo-encoding

I am using Firefox (Iceweasel) 24 in Debian Wheezy. When I go to https://www.youtube.com/html5 it shows me that my browser does not support H.264

When I go to the same URL with Chrome, it shows H.264 is supported

After googling, I found few debian bug reports about this. Seems that H.264 is disabled deliberately. Indeed when I go to about:buildconfig in Firefox, I see it has been compiled with --disable-gstreamer

I am confused why this is disabled. Is this a technical reason, or a "license/free software" issue

Is there any simple way to enable H.264 in my browser (short of recompiling my own iceweasel package) ?

Can somebody please explain the situation and why it arose ?

EDIT:

I have all necessary packages installed:

gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
libx264-123
libavutil51
libavformat53
libavcodec53
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
chromium-browser

Best Answer

It seems that Iceweasel had GStreamer support disabled in 24.5 (details) due to dependency issues.

You have a few options here.

  1. Install non-libre Firefox via packages. There is a good rundown on how to do that here - see the accepted answer.

  2. Install Iceweasel from source. alpertek has already covered that very comprehensively.

  3. Switch from the stable version of Debian (wheezy) to testing or unstable. The newer Iceweasel (version 29+) packages seem to be using GStreamer 1.0 now and GStreamer support has been re-enabled per the changelog. You could consider pinning the newer version of IceWeasel from the testing or unstable repository, but I think you'd very quickly enter dependency hell, so can't recommend that.

Related Question