Skip to main content
  1. Blog
  2. Article

Canonical
on 15 September 2008

Codecs and DVD playback on Ubuntu 8.04 for all users


For the first time we are making codecs for media playback and a DVD player, from our partners at Fluendo and Cyberlink, available through the Ubuntu store. We have had relationships with these companies for a while and to date we have offered their products to our hardware partners as pre-install options.

Now though, we are making them available to all users. It is important to us that no matter how you choose to access Ubuntu, pre-installed or as a free download, that you can have a similarly rich experience. The vast majority of our current users will have installed Ubuntu themselves. These users should also be allowed legal DVD and media playback and so we have built a way of letting them do this.

We cannot ship codecs through the distro, as they are not free to redistribute. So we have built a restricted download area that is accessible through the store. Once purchased you can find your software here which will then install in the familiar hassle-free way that Ubuntu users appreciate. A pretty cool feature is that, should you wipe out your machine you can go back to the restricted download area and access your codecs again. Enjoy

Gerry Carr – Marketing Manager, Canonical

Related posts


Hugo Huang
28 May 2026

Canonical announces optimized Ubuntu images for TPU virtual machines by Google Cloud

AI Article

Canonical and Google Cloud announced the availability of certified Ubuntu images for Google’s Cloud TPU Virtual Machines. ...


David Beamonte
28 May 2026

VMware hypervisor deployment using MAAS

MAAS Article

Most modern datacenters are inherently heterogeneous. VMware environments coexist with container platforms, databases, and other bare-metal workloads, often on the same hardware over several years. Servers are bought once, but their role changes as requirements evolve. However, ESXi (the VMware hypervisor) provisioning is often handled se ...


Rob Gibbon
28 May 2026

Migrating from Apache Spark 3 to Spark 4

Data Platform Article

The purpose of this guide is to highlight the key differences between Apache Spark 3 and Spark 4, and provide advice on how to plan a migration. Let’s get started. The biggest changes Let’s talk about the biggest changes between Apache Spark 3.x and Spark 4. Scala 2.12 no more First up, there’s no support ...