Opera - your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available

I'm using opera browser version 56.0.3051.43 on Ubuntu 16.04 with I3wm and I get

your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available

when trying to play some videos on youtube on respect to HTML5. I've seen a couple forums about this, but only about very outdated versions and none are very clear steps. How can I fix this problem?

Due to legal restrictions Opera is unable to distribute H264 codec. You can use the following workaround:

Install chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra package and create a link to libffmpeg.so:

sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/chromium-browser/libffmpeg.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera/libffmpeg.so

You can check your opera installation directory in the About dialog.

I had installed opera with the deb package downloadable from Opera's site and it did not load HTML 5 videos from youtube. The only solution that worked for me was to uninstall the version I had with:

sudo apt-get remove --purge opera-stable

and then installed the version from the PPA package following this other AskUbuntu post.

Adding a pointer to the opera stable sources:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ stable non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/opera.list'

Install the key:

sudo sh -c 'wget -O - http://deb.opera.com/archive.key | apt-key add -'

Fetch the new repository:

sudo apt-get update

Install latest Opera with:

sudo apt-get install opera-stable

Now Opera is able to handle HTML5 videos.

From a web search for opera linux enable h.264 I found this answer over on the Unix & Linux SE H.264 support for Opera and openSUSE that suggests trying a few different ideas, but it lead to a more promising looking Opera forum from 4 months ago that might/should work:

burnout426 4 months ago
@drpostman A little bit better directions.

Start Opera, goto, https://github.com/iteufel/nwjs-ffmpeg-prebuilt/releases/ and download the 0.31.4-linux-x64.zip file. In Opera's download dialog, click the folder icon to show the file in the file manager. Right-click it and choose "Extract here". This will give you libffmpeg.so.

Right-click in a blank spot in the file manager and choose "open as root" and type in your password. Then, right-click on libffmpeg.so and choose cut.

Then, in the file manager, browser to "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera/". Right-click in a blank spot and choose to create a new folder named lib_extra. Once the folder is created, go into it, right-click on a blank spot and choose paste. You should then see libffmpeg.so there. Then, restart Opera and goto https://youtube.com/html5 to see if h.264 support is enabled for example. Then, test out some videos. On youtube, you can right-click on a video and choose "stats for nerds" to see if it's using vp9 or h.264. Or, you can try these h.264 videos to make sure they work.

You can then close the file manager.

(Tested on Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon x64)

Others answers that might be worth trying (from the earlier question) include:

• Copy a libffmpeg.so file from https://github.com/iteufel/nwjs-ffmpeg-prebuilt/releases or http://ppa.launchpad.net/saiarcot895/chromium-beta/ubuntu/pool/main/c/chromium-browser/
• Use the snap version of opera

The instructions by Sergey Podobry did not work for me on Ubuntu 19.10. Further digging into the issue, it seems that chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra does not have the necessary codec anymore. This can be notices if you look at the package list of files here.

Instead, this is what I did:

• Download the codec from an earlier Ubuntu release, Like 18.04, from here.

• Extract the package, and then extract data.tar.xz file.

• Within the extracted folder, navigation to data/usr/lib/chromium-browser. You will find the codec named libffmpeg.so.

• Move this file to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera/lib_extra.

• Restart Opera.

The problem is not so much with Opera and in all fairness the issue here is with libffmpeg.so which is in fact proprietary codec support. I have a little script that adds the support you need after an Opera update or install. Get the script here. Once you have it, make it executable and run it as follows.

chmod 755 opera_codec.sh
./opera_codec.sh

Hope this helps you out as it has always worked for me. You can then go test your html5 support at https://html5test.com