Youtube and SoundCloud without Flash on Linux
Yeah right – that’s the title! And that is what I wanted to achieve this time.
My regular readers know that I am running Slackware64 -current since…years. One thing that has always bugged me was Firefox not having H.264 and MP3 support built in.
This is a horrible situation! Of course, there is Chrome available for Slackware which supports all the fancy HTML5 multimedia standards, ships a Flash version maintained by Google and works pretty well, but: It has a “burger menu” design and all the plugins I like seem to be a bit better on Firefox, feature-wise.
So I rebuilt Firefox and here’s how:
First, I needed gstreamer packages for H.264 and MP3 decoding.
It turns out, that gst-plugins-good is always needed. Slackware already comes with that (version 0.10.x).
For MP3 support you have to build gst-plugins-ugly, a perfect example is the usage of SoundCloud without Flash.
- If you have Firefox <30 and gstreamer 0.10.x you also need: gst-ffmpeg for H264 videos (and of course, ffmpeg)
- If you have Firefox >=30 and gstreamer 1.x you need: gst-libav (but you can still use the older version)
For Firefox –enable-gstreamer, for Firefox >=30 –enable-gstreamer=1.0 has to be passed to the configure script, but the most recent Firefox version (30 beta7) doesn’t run with GStreamer 1.x. It works in the final!
Of course, I created Slackbuilds and packages for Slackware64 -current, you can find them here.
Test HTML5 here:
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