Watching streams(like Twitch) in Opera (67.0.3575.53) on Linux(Fedora31++) solved

vprofirov

vprofirov

The problem: seems to be in the version of the ffmpeg installed from the official repositories.

The solutions:

Prebuilt version is taken from : [https://github.com/iteufel/nwjs-ffmpeg-prebuilt]

Below in the description there is 32bit and 64bit version:

download the version for your OS
extract
go to : /usr/lib64/opera
backup your soon to be old: libffmpeg.so --> libffmpeg.so.bkp
move the new libffmpeg.so in to its place : /usr/lib64/opera

A Former User

Serious question, because I really see this as "the best" workaround a lot lately. It is even mentioned on opera's reddit!
https://old.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/wiki/opera/linux_libffmpeg_config

What makes this libffmpeg more suitable for opera than any other libffmpeg from other projects? Every single electron/nodejs app (skypeforlinux, spotify, vs code, etcher, discord etc, to name a few) comes with its own libffmpeg lib, but why hasn't anyone suggested their lib instead of this one? What makes this one so special?

One could argue that size is a consideration, since all other apps bundle a lot more stuff and come at 50+MB each, but I think that size is not an issue with today's dowload speeds.

A Former User

Now that I have a ton of time to spare due to the virus quarantine, I made some tests to prove my point. And because I did not want to ruin my opera installation, I installed opera beta, on v68 today, and did all the testing there.

So, 10 days after my original question, here is some proof that the libffmpeg from other electron based project works too. The libffmpeg in question comes from skypeforlinux. I just downloaded the deb file, extracted libffmpeg from it and moved it to opera's folder. It's the same procedure that the thread and the "wiki" on reddit describes, but with libffmpeg coming a different source.

Without it, the usual poor, codec support, with most notable the lack of h264 decoding

And with it, that... precious h264 support is now available and all sites work as they should.

So the questoin remains. Why should someone prefer that libffmpeg from the github repo and not from some other electron app?
In my eyes, both give the user an equal amount of risk to break their system or the browser.