why do I have copy libffmpeg.so?

A Former User

Vivaldi does not have a licence for h264 as well, because it also depends on chromium ffmpeg codecs to play h264 content.

As for firefox, read my post here
https://forums.opera.com/topic/27537/can-t-play-facebook-videos-or-gifs-in-opera-w-linux-mint/17
If it was not for cisco to provide ff with that royalty-free lib, firefox would still not have h264 support.

A Former User @sgunhouse

@sgunhouse then Opera can use chromium-ffmpeg snap package which is distributed by canonical. plus, unlike apt, it is version safe and available to multiple distro.

A Former User

Please do not compare apt's (or any package manager's) features (package signing, automatic dependency resolution to menion a few) with the novelties of snap (or flatpak or appimage). A properly made package is and will always be superior to window-like software installation solutions like the forementioned.

And I assume you heard about the secret coin mining script that was found in a snap app a few months ago.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/14/ubuntu_crypto_mining_apps/

yeswap

yeswap @Guest

@jimunderscorep re: "Vivaldi does not have a licence for h264 as well, because it also depends on chromium ffmpeg codecs to play h264 content". On my Ubuntu 14.04 LTS system: A fresh install of Vivaldi can play the H.264/MP4 video on https://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html but Opera can not. I don't know how Vivaldi does it. Perhaps the Opera devs can take a look at Vivaldi, figure what they are doing and add the same workaround to Opera.

Also, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenH264 the OpenH264 binaries that Firefox uses are free for any software project to use. Maybe Opera could be modified to use the OpenH264 binary instead of the chromium one.

I believe that Opera adoption on Linux will remain low unless Opera can come up with a way to seamlessly play the most popular video format on the web without requiring users to implement a workaround that's only good until the next time Opera or Chromium updates.

A Former User @yeswap

@yeswap I'm ready to drop opera. I like opera better than any other browser but I like what works. I hope opera fixes that. I was using vivaldi for a while.. might go back.

A Former User

@yeswap
Do you also have chromium ffmpeg codecs along with vivaldi?
As for the openh264 lib, it only only solves a part of the problem, the h264 support. Ok, I admit that the problematic h264 playback is what 99,9% users complain about, but there is more than that. Chromium ffmpeg codecs provide support for h265 (I am not sure about that though), aac audio and a couple more non free (= loyalty free) formats which I can not remember now.
And the support for the free formats (webm, ogg etc, even mp3) comes from the libffmpeg that comes with opera. If you were an opera developer, would you risk breaking the playback of the other free formats in order to play one non free, even with an open source lib?

@operauser567
Your call. I do not touch vivaldi and any other electron based bs.

A Former User

@jimunderscorep I am not saying that snap is superior. currently, on ubuntu, opera is using chromium ffmpeg codecs shipped by canonical (apt package) which is not available on my distro. what I am trying to say here that opera should use a list of directory that contains chromium ffmpeg codecs.

@avl Isn't it possible to use snap based chromium-ffmpeg if a distro is not ubuntu based and chromium-ffmpeg (shipped by canonical) snap package exists?

A Former User @Guest

@jimunderscorep said in why do I have copy libffmpeg.so?:

As for firefox... If it was not for cisco to provide ff with that royalty-free lib, firefox would still not have h264 support.

It's not true. Cisco codec is only used fo WebRTC. Firefox required system codecs for h264 playing.

A Former User @Guest

@adasiko
No it is not. Here is the official statement.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/open-h264-plugin-firefox

A Former User @Guest

@jimunderscorep Vivaldi is not Electron-based. Brave is Electron-based, but Vivaldi is Qt-based, just like Opera. It is definitely slower than Opera though, not sure why.

@s4n-op You don't actually need to copy anything. As long as the installed Opera version is compatible with the installed Chromium codecs, everything works fine (except Netflix or Stan, but that's a different story).

A Former User

Please prove to me that vivaldi is qt based. It is slower than opera for that exact reason, it is built on an inferior toolkit.
And give me some time to find an article or something that proves that.

Brave is electron based, but who cares

p.s. I assume you already know that electron, npm, nodejs etc is the exact same thing named differently.

---edit
Got it. Straight from wikipedia

Vivaldi is built around and based on web technologies such as HTML5, Node.js, React.js, and numerous NPM modules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)

A Former User @Guest

@jimunderscorep said in why do I have copy libffmpeg.so?:

@adasiko
No it is not. Here is the official statement.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/open-h264-plugin-firefox

Yes, it’s only for video calls (not for HTML5 video). It’s very simple to check.

Firefox uses its open source alternative, OpenH264, to support video calls. OpenH264 is released in collaboration with Cisco and Mozilla. It is automatically installed by Mozilla on your Firefox browser to enable video calls with devices that require the H.264 codec.

A Former User @Guest

@adasiko
Let me post some screenshots to make myself understood.
Firefox 62 without libopenh264 on

and with libopenh264 on

Guess which other browser has the same boxes UNticked on the above tables (because its the LACK of support that we discuss in this thread).

p.s. Removing libopenh264 also removed deadbeef, chromium and mpv from my system, pretty much everything that depends on ffmpeg's libs directly. These are 3 apps I use all the time, so there will be no more screenshots from me on that subject. I hope I made my point on how firefox works and how it would work if there was not for libopenh264. Have a nice day.

A Former User @Guest

@jimunderscorep said in why do I have copy libffmpeg.so?:

Firefox 62 without libopenh264 on

May be something change from 2017 year. https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/1529

https://andreasgal.com/2014/10/14/openh264-now-in-firefox/

Firefox currently uses OpenH264 only for WebRTC and not for the <video> tag, because OpenH264 does not yet support the high profile format frequently used for streaming video. We will reconsider this once support has been added. (c) 2014

But it's same thing. Firefox use SYSTEM codecs which depends from system authors.
And firefox can played h264 video in Ubuntu before Open264 has been created (with gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad or gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly).

And for original comment:

As for firefox... If it was not for cisco to provide ff with that royalty-free lib, firefox would still not have h264 support.

It's not true anyway.

yeswap

yeswap @Guest

@jimunderscorep You asked "Do you also have chromium ffmpeg codecs along with vivaldi?"
I do. chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra version 65.0.3325.181-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 is installed. I don't recall installing it separately. I suspect it cane with chromium, which I did install.

Re: "If you were an opera developer, would you risk breaking the playback of the other free formats in order to play one non free, even with an open source lib?" I'm not qualified to make that call. But any enhancement to a software project requires analysis, including risk assessment and cost/benefit analysis, as well as through testing before release.

A Former User @yeswap

@yeswap said in why do I have copy libffmpeg.so?:

I do. chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra version 65.0.3325.181-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 is installed. I don't recall installing it separately. I suspect it cane with chromium, which I did install.

Then obviously h264 works on vivaldi because you provide it that "missing piece" it needs to work.

Oddly, ubuntu stopped upgrading chromium and all packages related to it, i.e. chromium ffmpeg codecs, on version 65 for ubuntu 14.04. So, in your situation, opera's h264 support will always be broken from v53 and on (opera 52 is based on chromium 65, opera 53 is based on chromium 66 etc), with or without installing chromium ffmpeg codecs because the package the repo provides is not new enough for it. So yes, from that point of view, vivaldi may be a better, if not the only, option for an up to date chromium-based browser.

You are on 14.04, aren't you?

yeswap

yeswap @Guest

@jimunderscorep You're right. The latest stable Vivaldi is still based on Chrome 65 so that's why mpeg4 works in Vivaldi.

I also have both Chrome 67 and Opera 54 (based on Chrome 67) installed. Shouldn't Opera 54 be able to use the Chrome 67 mpeg4 codecs?

Yes. I'll stay on 14.04 until it's EOL in April 2019.

A Former User

Chrome (as in google chrome) neither comes with its own libffmpeg, nor depends on ffmpeg's libav* libraries... so I have no idea what it uses for its multimedia needs.

Opera, on the other hand, can only use the libffmpeg in these directories as an alternative to its own

$ cat /usr/lib/x86_64-linux- gnu/opera/resources/ffmpeg_preload_config.json
[
  "lib_extra/libffmpeg.so",
  "../../../../chromium-ffmpeg/libffmpeg.so",
  "/usr/lib/chromium-browser/libffmpeg.so",
  "/usr/lib/chromium-browser/libs/libffmpeg.so"
]

A Former User @Guest

@s4n-op You don't actually need to copy anything. As long as the installed Opera version is compatible with the installed Chromium codecs,

@denisftw it is true for apt chromium package (only available on ubuntu based distro). opera knows the installed location. but, in my case, I am on a debian based distro, I can't install that package, instead, I have a snap chromium codecs. opera does not know the installed location. It would be great if opera add support for snap chromium codecs, then, playing video issues will be solved for all major distro as snap is available for multiple distro.

A Former User @Guest

I have a snap chromium codecs. opera does not know the installed location. **It would be great if opera add support for snap chromium codecs

You can install opera from snapstore

snap install opera