How to play a webm video file?

I have tried vlc, Banshee and Totem but none of them recognize the webm format. Even the system does not recognize its mime-type. How do I play it ?

Solution 1:

You will have add the PPA ppa:gstreamer-developers/ppa

To do that

• Open Update Manager.
• Click on Settings.
• Go to 'Other Software' Tab.
• Click 'Add'
• Paste ppa:gstreamer-developers/ppa and click add source.
• Click close , Reload when asked.
• Install Updates.

Now you can view webm in the default media player(totem) .

Additionally if you want to make it automatically open in totem,right click and select open with other application and select Movie Player and tick 'Remember this application for webm documents'

Source

Same via the command line:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gstreamer-developers/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
# fixing a weird gstreamer installation error
sudo apt-get -f install

# now "totem <your .webm file>" will do the right thing )

Source

Solution 2:

Firefox 4 and Chromium will play it.

Solution 3:

VLC

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:n-muench/vlc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlc 

It runs almost every format, haven't used a format that it could not use.

From VLC 1.1.0 release log:

Support for WebM decoding and encoding

Solution 4:

This is not a real solution i guess, but you can rename it to .mkv as it is based on matroska and most media players should be able to play it "as is" provided that you have all the necessary decoders, demuxers etc. for the included media streams already installed.

There used to be occasions where a player didn't recognize or accept the file extension, while it could open it and play back the content after it was renamed to .mkv though.