chromium-all-codecs-bin

Download a platform compatible (mac/win32/64) Chromium binary that supports all media codecs like h264 and aac that are not available in Chromium by default (due to licensing issues).

refs: https://chromium.woolyss.com https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/6celi9/chromium_websites_safe/dhuwj2g/

WARNING!

This is not super reliable. The linux version does not work and mac/windows versions are different, but they should work for most codecs.

Please consider using something else like electron (which comes with its own version of chromium that can play most likely all of the codecs you want that default chromium can't) or Chrome (not chromium) + puppeteer-core.

For simple needs you might like https://github.com/talmobi/eleko that gives a small puppeteer API to control an electron browser (which is a bit cumbersome to do out of the box compared to puppeteer).

Easy to use

Install

npm install --save chromium-all-codecs-bin

Sample Module usage

const puppeteer = require( 'puppeteer-core' )
const execPath = require( 'chromium-all-codecs-bin' )()
const opts = {
  headless: false, // show browser
  executablePath: execPath
}
;(async function () {
    let browser = await puppeteer.launch( opts )

    const pages = await browser.pages()
    page = pages[ 0 ]

    await page.goto( 'https://tools.woolyss.com/html5-audio-video-tester/' )
    // h264 and AAC now supported~
    // ( e.g. some YouTube video's require this for playback )
})()

About

Installs woolyss based all-codecs+ Chromium binaries for the current platform and returns the path to the executable that was downloaded.

Why

Chromium by default (that comes with puppeteer, for example) does not support licensed codecs such as h264 and AAC which makes it unable to play these media files (e.g. unable to play certain YouTube videos).

For who?

I wanted to play media files that used h264 and/or aac through puppeteer which its default bundled Chromium wasn't able to do.

How

Basically mimic the way puppeteer downloads/installs binaries and replace the url's with woolyss url's for the all-codecs+ prebuilt binaries.

See: https://chromium.woolyss.com

Related

chrome-finder

puppeteer

Test

Tests against all videos found at: https://tools.woolyss.com/html5-audio-video-tester/

npm test