Flash not working on Opera 64

A Former User @Guest

@jdandrews
First of all make sure that the site(s) you mention do use flash. It's 2019 and 99% of the sites out there use html5 for their video content.

Second, the sites probably use h264 and opera does not support it. For the why, check the post on my signature and use another browser for these sites, because fedora does not package chromium ffmpeg codecs.

Third, as fas as flash is concerned, check it on a page that uses a flash element, e.g flash's about page here, and do not rely on sites that use javascript to detect it, e.g the one mentioned above.
https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/about/

A Former User

I'm not sure about the 99% statistic. I realize Flash is on it's way out, but it looks to me like a number - lots - of sites are still using it. I went to Aljazeera's site, right clicked on a video that wouldn't play and chose "player information" (or something like that). It reported that the technology was Flash.

When I went to the Adobe link you suggested, it told me to enable Flash and gave me a button to do so, even though I've checked it two or three times in Opera's settings and it was always enabled. After clicking on that button the flash video worked, but when I went back to Aljazeera, it still wouldn't work. So I tried a video on bbc.co.uk/news and got the message about enabling flash player again. So I clicked again and the video played. At the same time they showed a message saying I would have to upgrade my browser or device because in 2020 Flash would be history.

Now, regarding H.264, Fedora does have GStreamer H.264 codec, which I installed, though I have no clue as to whether Opera can deal with it or not. After reading your message I poked around until I discovered that I could also install ffmpeg via the rpm fusion repository, so I did that too. And just to be sure, I then restarted my computer. It was after restarting that I did the above test at BBC and Aljazeera. So there's something else going on here and I guess that until someone figures it out, I'll have to use Chrome, at least for sites with videos that I want to see.

Incidentally, I never have problems with youtube videos, which of course are html5

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer @Guest

@jdandrews Have you tried to disable Flash in settings? Many sites that asks for Flash in Opera, start using HTML5 when Flash is disabled.

A Former User

Tried it. No joy. On one site I noticed a little block icon pop up at the top right of the screen (with flash enabled or disabled). Clicking on it and choosing to play it made it work sort of. That is, the audio came through fine, but the video was very choppy. In my settings, when I have flash enabled, I don't have it blocking any site, so this doesn't really make any sense. When I disabled it at BBC's site they just tell me I can't see the video because I don't have flash enabled. At a Portuguese news site, with flash enabled, they tell me I can't view the video and suggest I get the latest version of Chrome.

A Former User

Please point me to a video on al jazeera's site, because I can't find any. Everything I found under here points to a simple article of a few words
https://www.aljazeera.com/video/

As for bbc's site, it seems that it uses flash as a fallback option, like some other sites do. How did i find out? It plays on firefox and chromium, where I keep flash disabled.

Regarding h264. Opera does not use gstreamer's library for h264 (maybe the presto opera did, but it is as dead as internet explorer). Opera uses its own libffmpeg, which does not support h264. And no matter what you may install, unless it is that libffmpeg from chromium ffmpeg codecs on ubuntu, it still does not use them.

Last but not least, youtube (and only youtube) uses webm as a fallback for browsers like opera that do not support h264. Webm has several drawbacks compared to h264, e.g. lack of hardware acceleration.

A Former User

RE Aljazeera's videos, I normally go to the bottom of their home page where there are a few videos along with a featured video. However, when I followed the link you gave there, I in fact saw several videos. With Flash enabled in Opera I was able to view them, but very, very choppy, useless really, but they were all there.

If BBC is falling back to something else, I would have to assume that it's not WebM because when I disable Flash in Opera, I always get a notification that I have to install Flash to view the video.

When I went to Opera's site to download the program, I noticed that it is definitely Ubuntu-oriented. I had to scrounge a bit to find the rpm version so I'm guessing that they have made a corporate decision to focus on Ubuntu and derivatives and possibly I will have to finally abandon Opera. It's not that I like Fedora better than Ubuntu, only that for the present Fedora is the only flavor of Linux that actually works right on my computer, at least of the 4 or 5 distros I've tried.

l33t4opera

l33t4opera @Guest

Hi @shadowzyx, you can check if you have installed the latest version of the plug-in .270 (I noticed, that sometimes Opera will refuse to use it, if the version is too old), and if not download it using this link - it should offer you to download "flash_player_ppapi_linux.x86_64.tar.gz" file, save it somewhere, and unpack the "libpepflashplayer.so" and "manifest.json" files to "/usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin".

If it still doesn't work, try to run the opera with the switches as show below:
/usr/bin/opera --ppapi-flash-path=/usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libpepflashplayer.so --ppapi-flash-version=32.0.0.270
and see if this helps.

l33t4opera

l33t4opera @Guest

Hi @jdandrews, if you mean https://www.aljazeera.com/video (as @jimunderscorep mentioned it above), then the videos are served to replay using H.264 video codec + AAC for audio, and therefore all you need is correct version of "libffmpeg.so" lib, which you need to place on one of the paths, that are recognized by the Opera.

For example, you can download one of the chromium-codecs-ffmpeg_77.0.3865.120 packages for x64 arch from here, e.g. this one, and unpack the "libffmpeg.so" file to "/usr/lib/chromium-browser/" folder, or if you don't want it be overwritten by some other version of that lib, you can copy it to "Opera's-installation-root/lib_extra" subfolder (you need to add it yourself). You can find the path of installation root in opera:about > Paths > Install (the default in your case should be /usr/lib64/opera).

A Former User

Well, congratulations. That proved to be the magic answer. I confess I was skeptical going to an archive designed for Ubuntu, but after diving down through the archives, I found the file. It turns out I had a file by the same name in /usr/lib64/opera, but it was only about half the size. I overwrote it with the new file and voilá, everything is good. Thanks much!

burnout426

burnout426 Volunteer @Guest

@jdandrews That will work, but the one that you overwrote is the one that is included with Opera for non-proprietary codecs that Opera can update when necessary. If you overwrite it, it breaks updating of that file. The one you downloaded should go in the lib_extra folder you create for separation of concerns purposes. Not a big deal though.

pindos

pindos

It is strange, but Opera doesn't save site settings for Flash. For example, I set flash setting to Allow for https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player.html. Flash works here fine. But when I close Opera and start it again the flash setting for this site is gone back to Ask(Default). What's the problem?

A Former User

For one more time, the problem was not flash itself but opera's lack of support for h264....

About the substitution of that "bad" libffmpeg with a "good" one.
As I have before, solutions like these should start with a "proceed at your own risk", because you are replacing something that the app needs to work, with something else, built differently.
There was one thread some months ago where some debian user's opera crashed at launch because of that "good" libffmpeg he changed.

As for opera forgetting sites that you have allowed flash to run.
If I remember correctly, this is a feature of chromium 75 or so and later. Sites are allowed to run flash as long as the browser is running. Once it is closed, the browser forgets it.

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer @pindos

@pindos

Flash Disabled by Default (Target: Chrome 76+ - July 2019)
Summary
Flash will be disabled by default, but can be enabled in Settings at which point explicit permission is still required for each site

https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap

You will need to allow Flash on sites every time you start Opera.

A Former User @leocg

@leocg said in Flash not working on Opera 64:

@pindos

Flash Disabled by Default (Target: Chrome 76+ - July 2019)
Summary
Flash will be disabled by default, but can be enabled in Settings at which point explicit permission is still required for each site

https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap

You will need to allow Flash on sites every time you start Opera.

This hasn't been my experience. When I first started poking around forums looking for a solution, the question of whether flash was enabled or not came up. When I checked on it, I saw that it was already enabled and I had never fooled with it before. And it has remained that way with no sites excluded ever since, except when I explicitly disabled it while experimenting. Possibly that is a characteristic unique to the rpm distribution.

If the last suggestion hadn't worked, I was going to uninstall Opera and try the snap version. It would be interesting to see if it has the same problem.

The thing that puzzles me in all of this discussion is why it's even necessary to go through all of this to enable a feature which is used all over the Internet. It looks like the Opera developers need to go to work on this one.