ubuntu-restricted-extras is a software package

Software package (installation)

In package management systems, which are commonly used with Linux-based operating systems, a package is a specific piece of software which the system can install and uninstall....

 for the computer operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 Ubuntu

Ubuntu (operating system)

Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...

 that allows the user to install essential software which is not already included due to legal or copyright reasons.

It is a meta-package that installs:

• Support for MP3
  MP3
  MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
  
   and unencrypted DVD
  DVD-Video
  DVD-Video is a consumer video format used to store digital video on DVD discs, and is currently the dominant consumer video format in Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia. Discs using the DVD-Video specification require a DVD drive and a MPEG-2 decoder...
  
   playback
• Microsoft TrueType
  TrueType
  TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript...
  
   core fonts
• Flash plugin
  Adobe Flash Player
  The Adobe Flash Player is software for viewing multimedia, Rich Internet Applications and streaming video and audio, on a computer web browser or on supported mobile devices. Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by the Adobe Flash authoring tool, by Adobe Flex or by a number of other...
  
  
• codec
  Codec
  A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal. The word codec is a portmanteau of "compressor-decompressor" or, more commonly, "coder-decoder"...
  
  s for common audio and video files

The Medibuntu

Medibuntu

Medibuntu is a community-maintained repository of Debian packages that cannot be included into the Ubuntu distribution for legal reasons....

 project has similar aims to the ubuntu-restricted-extras package.

Contents

The ubuntu-restricted-extras is a metapackage and has the following dependencies:

• flashplugin-installer
• gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
• gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
• gstreamer0.10-pitfdll
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse
• icedtea6-plugin
• libavcodec-extra-52
• libmp4v2-0
• ttf-mscorefonts-installer
• unrar

As of Ubuntu 10.10, several of these dependencies are included indirectly, through another metapackage called ubuntu-restricted-addons.

Inclusion

Due to the legal status of the software included in ubuntu-restricted-extras, the package is not included by default on any Ubuntu CDs. However, some distributions, such as Super OS, do bundle the package on their installation CDs.