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That's not true at all: the patent coverage has no practical effect.

Chromium supports all the codecs your local ffmpeg install supports, if you put symlinks to the libraries in /usr/lib/chromium-browser/. Everyone installs it this way, and it actually supports way more codecs than the official Chrome (Google didn't buy licenses for MPEG2, Xvid, etc.).

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Thanks for that titbit -- I have to disagree that "everyone installs it this way", because I certainly hadn't! (I installed on Ubuntu from the chromium-daily launchpad ppa). That fix makes me feel a bit better, but it's still a nasty blow against the idea of open and free formats.

Edit: I must be doing something wrong, because I can't get it to work. This might be a distro/version/phase of moon-specific fix?

Yeah, install the erroneously-named [1] chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree

[1] Ubuntu's default ffmpeg package has all the decoders turned on without being 'nonfree'.

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