Chromium won't play mp4

Question

I have chromium (version 79) installed on my Red Hat 7.6 system and cannot play any mp4 videos. I attached an image below of what it looks like when I run chromium-browser <mp4 video>. I have researched a bit and found a few solutions online that do not work. The first solution I found was to change the spec file line:

CHROMIUM_CORE_GN_DEFINES+=' ffmpeg_branding="Chromium" proprietary_codecs=false 

to

CHROMIUM_CORE_GN_DEFINES+=' ffmpeg_branding="ChromeOS" proprietary_codecs=true'

But this ended up with an unresolvable error when I tried to build it.

The second solution I found was to to follow the steps here: https://snapcraft.io/install/chromium-ffmpeg/rhel to install the chromium-ffmpeg package which should contain the codecs. It didn't work but I was able to find chromium-ffmpeg-extra (version 69) floating around online and installed it but still no change when trying to view the mp4.

Any tips on other solutions or how to debug this further?

Answer 1

If you use the snap versions, use only the snaps for Chromium and FFmpeg codecs (Snap from https://snapcraft.io/chromium). For info, I personally use kubuntu. MP4 videos (with h.264 + AAC codecs) play nicely.

Answer 2

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).

source: https://superuser.com/a/1545667/951213

I can confirm the woolyss.com portable build worked for playing mp4s for me (windows though).