Opera 58, Debian 9 Stretch, No support for h.264

A Former User

Or, instead of breaking your installation by installing packages that are not meant for your distro, you can just accept the fact that opera won't play h264 streams and use another browser.
As for the why, pleas read the posts in my signature.

A Former User

There are only one simple solution...
Install Opera from snap store

sudo apt install snapd
sudo snap install opera

l33t4opera

l33t4opera

Hi @jimunderscorep, there's quite a little risk, or no risk, that you break something on your distro, when you install pkgs, or even archived binaries from another distro, of course if you know what are you doing, and don't do things blindly.
There are several ways to make the H.264 work in Opera on Linux, and several of them works on most distributions.

Hi @adasiko, that's one of the solutions, but not everyone uses snap. Some people choose the "old school" installations, and some unpacking things from the archives, and usually it simply work.

A Former User

Let me make a small table containing almost everything major that is needed to build chromium so as to show you the differences between these 2 distros

	Debian 9	Ubuntu 16.04
alsa	1.3.0	1.1.0
gcc	6.3.0	5.3.1
gtk3	3.22.11	3.18.9
libc6	2.24	2.23
mesa	13.0.6	11.2.0
freetype	2.6.3	2.6.1
fontconfig	2.11.0	2.11.94
ffmpeg	3.2.12	2.8.15

Since numbers don't lie, I hope you can see that debian 9 (compared to ubuntu 16.04) is at least one major version ahead on most of the needed packages.

In other words, and as I always say, the ubuntu packages are not for debian because they were build with different dependencies. Or, as the debian wiki says about "frankendebian"

Repositories that can create a FrankenDebian if used with Debian Stable:
Debian testing release (currently buster)
Debian unstable release (also known as sid)
LUbuntu, Mint or other derivative repositories are not compatible with Debian!
Ubuntu PPAs

The same applies to packages, so I hope I made myself understood.

And, long story short, the only way to have proper h264 support on linux opera is to run ubuntu (or arch + some aur package, but that's another story), because opera follows ubuntu's way of building chromium.
For more info, please refer to the post on my signature.

l33t4opera

l33t4opera

Hi @jimunderscorep, we talk here about H.264 support, and not about Chromium itself, and what is required, and different on various distros to build it from the sources.

With all due respect, but you talk a lot of things in this forums from quite a long time already, and in some you are right, but in several things you are wrong, or you have bad understanding of it. I would like to ask you, please don't give me any replies anymore, thank you in advance.

A Former User

H264 support in opera can come in one and only way: the installation of chromium ffmpeg codecs, provided that the distro packages them. Do you aggree on that?

Chromium ffmpeg codecs are part the packages that are built by chromium's source. And these packages, along with chromium, have to depend on stuff whose version varies on each distro. And that is what makes the important difference.

Sorry if i sounded offensive
Feel free to mention, either here or in pm, situations that I was wrong. I do a lot of searching before I write anything, so I want to be as correct as possible.

john-53

john-53

I have Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE 3), which is based on Debian 9 Stretch, on a machine and I was able to get Opera to play a problem video on YouTube by installing the Chromium 70 / Slimjet 21 libffmpeg.so file. It goes in the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera folder.

A Former User @l33t4opera

@l33t4opera said in Opera 58, Debian 9 Stretch, No support for h.264:

There are several ways to make the H.264 work in Opera on Linux, and several of them works on most distributions.

Hi @adasiko, that's one of the solutions, but not everyone uses snap. Some people choose the "old school" installations, and some unpacking things from the archives, and usually it simply work.

And it will be broken by next update...

l33t4opera

l33t4opera @Guest

Hi @adasiko, yes, it sometimes stops working, but not after every, next update. It usually occurs, when there is major update to a higher version of Chromium in the Opera. In this case, you need to update the libffmpeg to a version, which is close to, or matches the Chromium's version for that Opera's build.

A Former User

I've done a tutorial in Spanish for h.264 but it's in Spanish, basically downloading a file and typing three commands...

https://forums.opera.com/topic/30044/h-264-activar-para-ver-vídeos-gif-linux

berkut3000

berkut3000 @Guest

@colmi I remember trying this, before 57 and working, but after that, it no longer worked.
I will try later. and see if it works with the current version.

@jimunderscorep Interestingly enough; I tried to use Mozilla to play some Udemy videos; after failing to do so in Opera, but it is the same result.

A Former User

Udemy needs an account to let you access these videos, so I can not find what codec it uses, but it will be h264 most likely.
If that is the case, make sure you have libopenh264 installed, plus all 3 libav* ffmpeg libraries. That is for ff (and chromium, in case you also use it), opera will not use them at all, although it could and it should.