A question for our video uploaders.

3D Printing
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1

A question for our video uploaders.

I browse using Firefox on fedora GNU/Linux without proprietary software (well, almost, I have NVidia drivers).

I am subscribed to the likes of Tom’s YouTube channels and I can watch videos posted on YouTube without any problem.

I do have problems watching videos embedded in posts in this community which I guess is because they are in H.264 format which I cannot view.

Is this a limitation of Google+ vs. YouTube in the variety of video formats supported? It’s a little frustrating not to be able to play peoples show-and-tell videos directly but I don’t really want to install a bunch of restricted codecs.

2

I’ve got about the same setup with gentoo linux and nvidia, but I use chrome as my browser. I have no problem with any G+ videos. Could that be a difference?

3

Very likely yes. Chrome includes mechanisms to play proprietary formats (Flash included). You may have enabled those features within your ebuild without even knowing it.

4

The videos on Google plus may be vp8 an open codec. You should check if they are installed. You can also install the non open codec pack for vlc.

5

Chrome won’t play flash without the plugin. I don’t have the plugin
installed.

6

Chrome does come with the Adobe Flash plugin by default, but does not use it to play any of the video content coming from Google.
Youtube delivers content in h.264 and WebM VP8 and VP9, however a plugin-less Firefox will only play unprotected VP8. h.264 is enabled by the Cisco OpenH264 plugin by default, which is the standard format distributed by Youtube alongside the HTML5 player. This is the exact same format i’m getting delivered in Google Plus embedded videos.

So a plugin-less Firefox might not be able to do what you want. Have you tried Chromium?`It should behave just like Chrome without the closed Google addons that turn it into the “real” Chrome.

7

I put my “free as in freedom” ethic aside for one moment - in recognition of all the resources that Google gives us for free - and installed the Chrome repository on my fedora system. Videos play fine now.

8

@Thomas_Sanladerer I believe, certainly on fedora, that the Cisco codec is only used for WebRTC. For general H.264 content you have to use libraries accessed via the gstreamer1 interface and that usually entails using the rpmfusion non-free repository.

Installing google-chrome-stable from their repository is a one-stop solution and, as you said, it comes with the PepperFlash addon but I’m not too bothered about using it.