Google Chrome + H.264/AAC codec needed on RHEL6
Hi all
I need a running Chrome Browser with H264-Codec Support on RHEL6.
However, as RedHat isn't supporting that, I have to use third-party-applications.
I could install Chromium via optional-rhel-repo.
Question:
How can I support H264 on Chromium?
Thanks in advance and kind regards
Daniel Bossert
Responses
Hi Daniel,
You would need to install the H264 codec from a third-party repository, such as from Fedora. Considering that, it is probably easier to install the Chrome browser (which supports H264 out of the box) directly. There are ways to do that manually by downloading required dependencies (again, from Fedora), but you can also use a third-party script prepared for this specific purpose. See http://www.tecmint.com/install-google-chrome-on-redhat-centos-fedora-linux/ (works well on RHEL6).
Please note that neither this script, nor the resulting installation of the Chrome browser are supported by Red Hat.
In that case, you might want to have a look at https://github.com/adamel/chrome-deps, which offers basically the same thing but packaged as an RPM. More importantly, there's a list of the Fedora dependencies you need to download for the installation to succeed.
You could just download the required packages manually and distribute them to the machines without Internet connection.
Hi Daniel,
The chrome-deps-1.4.tar.gz file is what you need to prepare from the contents of that GitHub repository, specifically, from its src/ subdirectory. It then needs to be placed in the ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/ directory on the system where you want to build the package.
To prepare the .tar.gz file, do, for example, the following (this assumes that you already have the standard directory structure under ~/rpmbuild/):
wget https://github.com/adamel/chrome-deps/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
mv chrome-deps-master/ chrome-deps-1.4
cp chrome-deps-1.4/chrome-deps.spec ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/
tar zcvf chrome-deps-1.4.tar.gz chrome-deps-1.4/
mv chrome-deps-1.4.tar.gz ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/
Then change to the ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ directory and run the rpmbuild command (provided that you have already downloaded the required RPMs from Fedora to the ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/directory:
rpmbuild -bb chrome-deps.spec
You should end up with a new RPM package called chrome-deps-1.4-1.el6.x86_64.rpm in the ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/ directory. Install this package along with the Google Chrome package downloaded from Google, and that should be it.
Hi Daniel - I think if I was in this predicament (requires Google Chrome/H.264 and disconnected), I would do the following:
Find a system that is not disconnected to use as the staging system
Install RHEL and update
add EPEL and RPMfusion repos (and make sure system is still current)
add the Google Repo
add the download only yum plugin
yum install downloadonly google-chrome-stable
then yum install google-chrome-stable
This may seem like an odd strategy, so I'll go through what I am thinking:
* I would not want to custom build the necessary packages as I am now "responsible" for updating that custom build
* If you do a custom build at this point, what is the maintenance strategy going forward when patches/updates are needed
* running download-only will produce a list of packages it pulls down (and I believe which repos it grabs it from), this will also allow you to review the task using yum history. I believe when you need to update the packages later, you can do the same exact steps to gather the list of new files, etc... and recreate your bundle.
If you wanted to get really fancy - you could assemble the packages you determine are necessary and make an "offline repo" with them. (I believe the puppet installer does something similar). You do a createrepo of a base directory, create a yum.repo file pointing at that directory and then you can do a simple yum install which will do it's best to ensure dependencies, etc.. are met.
So - I don't know (for certain) if what I suggested would work or how much work it would take, but I think it would work. If this is truly a one-time event of installing the app, my suggested method might not be worth the effort
Hi James,
The trouble is that it's no longer possible to install Google Chrome on RHEL without those Fedora 15/17 dependencies (libraries) -- not even when you enable the EPEL and RPMFusion repos. So this method wouldn't work :-(
The upside of the method that involves preparing your own package with the Chrome dependencies is that you can then update the Chrome package normally (from the offic. Google repo). The only responsibility is for the chrome-deps package, and that will most likely stay the same (that is, until Google screws up the dependencies again, of course).
Ha - and I will explain my "ha"... I actually complained about this (google dropping support for RHEL 6) previously in a thread and had forgotten. I actually moved to using Mozilla/firefox again because of it. I'm getting senile.
The biggest sticking point for me in wanting to let the repos and yum do all the heavy lifting...
9 | -y install google-chrome | 2014-11-20 21:58 | Install | 77 EE
77 packages!!!
If the OP was building immutable systems, or updating an image for rapid-deployment - I imagine updates are not that important. I was just worried about the consequences of having the "rogue" packages out there when it comes time to update.
Thanks for reminding me that Chrome is not available on RHEL 6 ;-)
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