opera beta 51.0.2830.23 linux debian x64 problem with display films into faceboobk tweeter etc (adobe flash player)

ramai

ramai

Hi, I have problem with display films into facebook, tweeter etc.. I use linux debian sid x64 and opera beta ver: 51.0.2830.23 :(, the previous version was OK ( 50.0.2762.42 ). what can i do? go back to the previous version??

sgunhouse

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer

Films? As in, animated GIFs, actual videos, or both? Possibly you need to update the related codecs package. Fixed your title for you.

A Former User

Let me make a simple q&a thingy, because one in two threads in here nowadays are complaints about some videos not playing.

- What are those videos?
The videos in facebook (gifs too), twitter, instagram etc are all in some html5 media codec, mostly h264. That is also why flash does not have any effect whether it is installed or not. Flash is another story that I won't cover here.

- Why don't they play in opera?
Opera, like every other app, has to use a library to make them play inside the browser. That library is libffmpeg and opera's libffmpeg has a serious limitation: it can not play proprietary formats like h264 and h265 for video, aac and mp3 (see note below) for audio etc, but it can play free formats like ogg and webm. This will not change anytime soon due to licencing issues,

- How can I overcome this disability of opera?
Opera, being a chromium based browser, can use chromium's libffmpeg, or chromium ffmpeg codecs as it is better known, provided they are or can be installed. Once they are installed, opera detects them and uses that libffmpeg instead of its own,

However, there is a big "if" here, and that "if" determines the 2 options you have.

1) If you are on a distro that does package chromium ffmpeg codecs, like ubuntu.
You just install them and you are done. Keep in mind however that opera and the forementioned codecs have to be built by the same chromium source, e.g. opera 50 was based on chromium 63, so only chromium ffmpeg codecs 63 would work with it, not newer, neither older versions.

2) If you are on a distro that does not package chromium ffmpeg codecs, like debian or mandriva.
These distros provide the relevant html5 multimedia support for chromium (and any chromium based browser) via 3 seperate ffmpeg libs: libavcodec, libavformat and libavutil. The problem is opera can neither detect them, nor use them, so you are out of luck. Use another browser for those sites.

Expert's advice on the above
From time to time, someone will post a "solution" to the libffmpeg problem. This will either be "install this ubuntu's chromium ffmpeg codecs package by hand to get the... precious html5 support" or "get that tar,gz from herecura's repo, untar it and move libffmpeg to the right place to make it work".
Both are wrong because they refer to packages built for a different distro (ubuntu in the first case, arch in the second), and definitely built with a different set of libraries and compilers. Do not do that unless you want to break your system or browser.

Note: The support for mp3 playback in html5 must have been added in opera 51. I am pretty sure opera 50 did not support mp3 playback...

p.s. Debian testing x64 user

A Former User @Guest

@jimunderscorep I am running Linux Mint 17.3, with the latest version of Opera. So you are saying, that all I have is download & install Chromium and Opera will render Facebook properly and run all its content? I have apparently downloaded & installed Opera beta 51.0.2830, should I un-install this and install Opera 50?

A Former User

Not chromium, chromium's ffmpeg codecs (packages chromium-ffmpeg-codecs and chromium-ffmpeg-codecs-extra). Do now ask me what is the difference between them or why there is a discrimination in a plain and a -extra package, I have no idea :p

Installing chromium will also pull these 2 because they are direct dependencies of the chromim-browser and solve your problem, but why install a whole other browser (200+mb of space) if you don't need it? The codecs packages themselves, once installed, are < 10MB.,

As for the versions, regardless of the naming they are given (stable, beta and developer). Let me explain with a... really bad looking table

Opera version	Chromium version it is based on	Chromium's codecs version that opera needs to work properly
49	62	62
50	63	63
51	64	64
52	65	65

And so on...
Chromium always gets updated to the newer version before opera does, and so do chromium's codecs. This means that every time chromium updates to a new major release, opera's html5 support will break until the new opera version is released. And all you can do to fix it is to wait for the new version of opera.

You should always use the latest version of opera, unless there is a real issue that prevents the update from happening., e.g. as we found out a few days ago, opera 51 has a dependency to libdbus-something that makes it impossible to install on ubuntu 14.04 and debian 8 because those distros can not satisfy it.

A Former User @ramai

@ramai

Is it possible to return to the previous version?

A Former User

@willow2 said in opera beta 51.0.2830.23 linux debian x64 problem with display films into faceboobk tweeter etc (adobe flash player):

@willow2 said in opera beta 51.0.2830.23 linux debian x64 problem with display films into faceboobk tweeter etc (adobe flash player):

@ramai

Is it possible to return to the previous Opera version without losing the content of passwords and bookmarks?

ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/desktop/

For example: 50.0.2762.45/ or 49.0.2725.56/

A Former User

If you remove the current one before installing the old one AND disable opera's deb repo so that apt can not update it, then yes, you will have an older version. But what's the point of having an old version?

A Former User @Guest

@jimunderscorep

Unfortunately I will have to change the browser on FF, because I can not imagine changing the Ubuntu system on 16.04-18.04 due to the fact that the browser can not be updated on the still supported system Ubuntu 14.04.
I'm sorry about it, but Opera has let me down

A Former User

I assume you have not read the enire thread here.

https://forums.opera.com/topic/24994/can-t-install-opera-51-on-ubuntu-14-04-lts

Please do and test what another member has changed in opera 51+ so as to make it installable on ubuntu 14.04.

A Former User

It Works !!!
Thank you very much!!!

A Former User

Adding some more info I found about libffmpeg...

https://forums.opera.com/topic/26506/problems-streaming-videos-on-opensuse-42-3/4