The Document Foundation and LibreOffice support the international campaign @endof10 https://endof10.org/ The countdown has begun. On 14 October 2025, Microsoft will end support for Windows 10. This will leave millions of users and organisations with a difficult choice: should they upgrade to Windows...
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I got a cheap mini pc. It had W11 on it which I promptly broke (I think it was when it insisted on me putting in a PIN but I closed the window). It also ran at 100% for no reason trying to do updates, but then refused to do any updates.
So I put the latest Ubuntu Linux on it. Seems OK, but I can't get anything to recognise the video codex stuff in the N150 CPU. It seems to know it's there, but Firefox and MPV won't use it...
I know when you install Mint there is a 'install codecs' checkbox during the installer, not sure if the same exists for Ubuntu.
For Ubuntu, you could try this and see if it solves your problem.
Yeah, tried all that, and not having much luck in Firefox and MPV. VLC fine. Replied to the other post, and it might be Snap blocking it. I dunno though, because I know basically fuck all about snap other than a lot of Linux people don't like it.
I have heard nothing good about snaps and Canonical pushing them is a big reason you don't see people recommending Ubuntu, and instead recommending things like Mint (me included).
Well, shit...
I went with Ubuntu because the N150 is fairly new (even if it's just a slightly faster N100) and the 25.04 Ubuntu kernel supports it out of the box.
I wouldn't worry about it too hard, there isn't anything fundamentally wrong with Ubuntu. Both it and mint are in the same family after all.
Sounds like you should just keep Ubuntu and get the non-snap versions of the apps that need codecs.
Yeah, I removed Snap mpv and reinstalled with apt.
Lo and behold, it works perfectly all of a sudden.
Firefox looks like more effort, and apt will install the snap version. Even if you uninstall snap. Fun. If I could enable what is missing I'd be OK, but I've no idea what it is...
You need to install the codecs, there's a way to do it on ubuntu, just google search it (and there's an option during installation to do it too). The N150 cpu and its integrated gpu is not a problem for your codec problem, it's a matter of installing the right software.
Yeah, I thought I'd ticked something similar during setup, but maybe it wasn't for that. I installed them and it hasn't really changed anything in either mpv or Firefox.
The compositing in Firefox is webrender (software) and appears to be using llvmpipe as the GPU. There's a 2nd "GPU" listed, but doesn't seem to use it All the codecs say hardware is disabled...
Installed VLC and that seems to use the hardware renderer. MPV and Firefox are both installed with Snap. I'm seeing a pattern that might not be there, but I'm already hating Snap. This is day two of my rebooted Linux experience...
Yeah, snaps won't be able to access the "external" codecs (outside their jail). So either install the official firefox package from the firefox site, or chrome.
