Native H.264 and WebGL support in Iron?

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gordon_freeman
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Oct 29, 2012 9:51 pm

Native H.264 and WebGL support in Iron?

Post by gordon_freeman »

Hi, I've preferred Iron Browser to Chrome / Chromium for a while now and have just installed it as my default (and only) browser on my new (to me) laptop with Arch Linux. However I'm having a few issues, Iron doesn't seem to support H.264 video (although WebM works fine) or WebGL -- both technologies that I'm sure are provided natively in Chrome and Chromium.

Given that Arch linux is a 'build from scratch' distro, at least in terms of package selection, I don't know if it's just a case that I'm missing some codecs / packages to enable support for these. Can someone help me please?

If it is simply a case of installing the correct packages and re-building Iron from source then which codecs and/or packages do I need to install?
If Iron does not 'natively' support these technologies then will they be included in a future release soon? Again, it's my understanding that both Google Chrome and the open source Chromium feature these technologies and Iron is based off of the same source code is it not? So it should be 'easy' to enable these right?

I hope someone can help me with these queries.

Thanks
bksening
Posts: 60
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2009 11:08 pm

Re: Native H.264 and WebGL support in Iron?

Post by bksening »

For H.264 support, the H.264 codec is not part of the Chromium source-code. Plain Chromium executables do not support H.264 and Iron is not getting it for free nether.

Each browser vendor that supports H.264 (eg. Google and Apple) has paid for a (not cheap) license to include the codec in their branded browsers. As far as I know SRWare does not have such a license, so Iron browser cannot support H.264.

For WebGL, my question is has Iron activated all the necessary flags/options for GPU hardware acceleration?
alx_max
Posts: 24
Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2010 11:18 am

Re: Native H.264 and WebGL support in Iron?

Post by alx_max »

Then is there a way to use the system installed codecs in order to get the H264 support?
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