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


Ishani Ghoshal
17 June 2026

Validating real-world skills through Canonical Academy

Ubuntu Community

In an increasingly volatile job market, standing out from the competition is vital. For many in the open source community, formal recognition for self-taught skills is a significant challenge. These skills are often built through hands-on hobbies, side projects, and deep community contributions. While the market is flooded with certificat ...


Bertrand Boisseau
17 June 2026

Virtualized Android comes to Anbox Cloud

Ubuntu Article

With our latest 1.30.0 Anbox Cloud release, available today, we are introducing one of the most significant evolutions of the platform to date: support for virtualized Android.  For the first time, Anbox Cloud can launch complete Android system images inside lightweight virtual machines, managed and orchestrated through the same Anbox API ...


Nina Rojc
16 June 2026

Template: Streamlining open source design contributions

Design Ubuntu tech blog

As designers working at Canonical, we’re always thinking about open source. We believe that encouraging more designers to contribute to open source  benefits everyone, from the project maintainers to the end users themselves.   In the 2025 edition of FOSSBackstage conference, we presented our research findings on  why designers don’t get ...