H.264 support for Opera and openSUSE

codecopensuseopera

I am using openSUSE Leap 42.2 and Opera 46.0.2597.57.

Some videos on the internet (maybe the half on YouTube) do not work on Opera.
YouTube tells me that I cannot watch the video and suggests me visiting https://www.youtube.com/html5.
H.264 and MSE & H.264 are not supported by my browser as the page mentions, although Opera is listed as suported.

I did some research and installed the following packages (which were not the sollution):

  • chromium-ffmpeg-extra
  • chromium-ffmpeg-extra-debuginfo
  • chromium-ffmpegsumo

Maybe I need to mention that Firefox works pretty fine with YouTube and other videos that do not work on Opera.

Thanks a lot for your help.

PS:
If this issue is fixed with openSUSE Leap 42.3 this would be an option for me, but I still hadn't enough time for an update.

Best Answer

This unfortunately is a known problem in Opera spanning to OpenSuse 42.3. YouTube reports that H.264 and MSE & H.264 both are unsupported when accessed from that OS. This is using Opera 46.0.2597.26, not quite as fresh as yours, but newer OS.

Looking around the web, there is reference to a Chromium codec patch. Uninstalling Chromium makes no difference on my setup, nor force reinstalling ffmpeg after uninstall of Chromium's extra codecs. For those not feint of heart, there is a manual-linking solution [1] involving libffmpeg.so, which seems to have success there (but must be redone each time Opera is updated). I have not tried the manual linking.

[1] https://solus-project.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1004

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