@denisftw thanks for the code to roll back Opera - now back working as it did. This has happened several times in the past when opera was updated and sometimes had to wait for severtal new versions before the problem was corrected.
By using 'apt-mark hold' function will that prevent any future updates - so how and when should i disable that?

Yes opera has become a real pain with this ongoing video problem. I had to role back to the last working stable system (42 .xxx) but finally decided that by now the latest version 44 would probably be fixed! Some hopes eh? I do like opera but this is ridiculous, I would use Vivaldi but it has dependency issues with my Ubuntu version so got to wait until I install Ubuntu 16. Is this all the result of the Chinese take over?

I still use Ubuntu32bit so cannot install Vivaldi or change the libffmpeg.so file because I have /usr/lib/chromium-browser/libffmpegsumo.so.
If I uninstall Opera 43 & roll back to opera 42.0.2393.517 by downloading again will I lose all my settings etc which are preserved during regular updates? If so I can wait until the next update if Opera fixes this issue.

Yes thanks sc44. Are opera aware of this bug?

Also I read, on opera help pages I think, that the latest versions are only for 64 bit systems - hope that's wrong!

Same problem since the update on Dec 14, Opera 42.0.2393.85 crashes on 32-bit ubuntu 12.04LTS. Hoped it would be fixed by now In meantime how do I downgrade to 41.0.2353.69 ?