Understanding video issues with Vivaldi for Linux snapshots

ruario

The following is an explanation of video issues that some Linux users encounter when running Vivaldi snapshots.

Click here to see the full blog post

LonM

It's stuff like this that always makes me nervous about recommending linux to less technically-minded people.
On the other hand, I've encountered small gripes in windows too, so maybe the moral of the story is that all technology is bad.

lamarca

@ruario Thank you one more time.
~~BTW: First~~

lamarca

One doubt: before running the new script should I delete
~/.local/lib/vivaldi ?

ruario

@lonm: The problem is encountered with snapshot versions. And to be honest if you are using snapshots you can expect the occasional bumpy ride as they are test versions.

So long as the people you suggest try Linux stick with stable, they should be just fine.

ruario

@lamarca: No. The files in there can be used by Vivaldi stable as it needs a different version of the lib since it is based on an older Chromium

lamarca

@ruario Thx. I forgot about the Vivaldi stable.

LonM

@ruario: Whenever a post goes live for a while you can't comment on vivaldi.com. You can comment if you go into the forums at vivaldi.net though.

cheekybuddha

OK, is this method preferable to using the ~/.local/vivaldi/libffmpeg.so ?

Yesterday, I downloaded the Opera version as referenced in other comments and saved locally, and then changed my symlink in .local/vivaldi/ to point to that one.

Everything works now, but is there a better way?

ruario

@cheekybuddha: Symlinking is not ideal IMHO particularly to a lib designed for Opera as our versions are not always in sync with theirs.

That said, I would keep ~/.local/vivaldi/libffmpeg.so for Vivaldi stable (it needs different version to snapshots) and place the snapshot's copy in the install directory.

ruario

@lonm: Has been reported to the team who look after vivaldi.com. Thanks!

Gwen-Dragon

@veraser No, my suggested was a workaround to give you users a quick solution.
You should delete ~/.local/lib/Vivaldi/libffmpeg.so
Use Ruaris solution! That works fine:

cd /tmp
wget https://launchpadlibrarian.net/353917794/chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra_64.0.3282.99-0ubuntu0.17.10.1_amd64.deb ;
ar p chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra_64*.deb data.tar.xz | tar Jx ./usr/lib/chromium-browser/libffmpeg.so --strip 4 ;
sudo cp libffmpeg.so /opt/vivaldi-snapshot/libffmpeg.so ;

ugly

This is more of a general question as a Linux noob. Is there a reason to copy libffmpeg.so as opposed to a symlink?

Steffie

@veraser said in Understanding video issues with Vivaldi for Linux snapshots:

@gwen-dragon how you and other linux-men

Grrrrr, i hate this casual assumption of dangly-bits.

Gwen is a female name not a male name.
Lilo is a female name not a male name [click her avatar!!].
She clearly displays the female icon in her signature.

Vivaldi users & community members do not axiomatically have to be male, & indeed some of us are not.

ruario

@veraser: Stable Ubuntu does not provide the lib directly yet. If we waited for Ubuntu then we would be waiting until Chromium 64 is released and you would get no Linux snapshots in the mean time. Given we would like to release very shortly after Chromium 64 this would basically mean that there were no snapshots for linux at all.

ruario

@veraser: If you want something that is less likely to encounter such issues you should be running stable and not snapshot. On stable this is not a problem.

ruario

@veraser: so 6 steps instead of 3 that you can simply copy and paste? Ok, if you think that is easier.

ruario

@veraser: No Opera does not provide this lib either. They cannot for the same reasons that we cannot. What @Gwen-Dragon linked to was a third party package (not associated with Opera or Vivaldi) which provides this lib.

The lib in question is libffmpeg.so compiled with proprietary media. By Proprietary media I mean h.264 with AAC audio. Both of which codecs are patented. To ship such a lib you need some reason why the patents do not apply to you.

ruario

@ugly: The symlink is not (yet) provided by any package within the distro repos. Hence it will not already be on your system. Where would the symlink point? The lib need only exist in one place, so why would you have a symlink and over complicate it?

masky

Hello,dev team.
This script fixed video playback on my machine.
Thanks for your hard work.
Linux Mint 18.3 kernel 4.13 Asrock Deskmini 110 Pentium G4560