H.264/AAC broken in the last update

leomay

Hi all!

Today I updated my Vivaldi through regular apt update and the new update apparently broke H.264/AAC support (noticed most YouTube videos won't play).

On start error: Vivaldi lacks a suitable component to play HTML5 'proprietary' media (H.264/AAC) is displayed.

Using Vivaldi 4.2.2406.44 stable on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS.

I checked few fixes I found on a similar posts from 2019., but none of them worked.

Edit 1: Tried purging and doing fresh install, no resolve.

Any advice would be most welcome.

macrad

@leomay
I have the same problem.

micho102

I have the same problem
On start error: Vivaldi lacks a suitable component to play HTML5 'proprietary' media (H.264/AAC) is displayed.
But I can play youtube videos without problem

I am using vivaldi 4.2.2406.44 on manjaro

npro

@micho102 On Manjaro, you have 2 packages, vivaldi and vivaldi-ffmpeg-codecs. Check that you have both installed, you shouldn't have any problems at all.

micho102

@npro Thank you very much for your (very very) prompt and correct answer. Installing vivaldi-ffmpeg-codecs solved the problem for me.
Thanks again

anstapa

Same issue. On ubuntu 20.04
With a fresh install
$ apt install ~/Downloads/vivaldi-stable_4.2.2406.48-1_amd64.deb

$ vivaldi
Following is produced:
'Proprietary media' support is not installed. Attempting to fix this for the next restart.

Restarting vivaldi does not solve the problem.

npro

@guigirl He's a new user

Also that's not quite correct, at least until today the script that calls the binary made sure that you would get the codec in case you wouldn't explicitly install it, it just placed it under ~/.local/lib/... for non .deb/.rpm distros and under /var/opt/... for OpenSUSE (and others I guess) after a browser relaunch.
It all started to degrade with @TbGbe shenanigans with his insecure distro, where ruari started to write a script over a script over a script to cover him.

TheMagican

@anstapa I did a clean re-install and after that, it worked again:

sudo apt remove --purge vivaldi-stable

# For me, the apt source file got deleted. In case this is also true for you:
echo 'deb https://repo.vivaldi.com/archive/deb/ stable main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vivaldi.list
sudo apt update

sudo apt install vivaldi-stable

DoctorG

@anstapa Works for me on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

The codec package is downloaded, that can take a while if download source has high load.

leomay

It appears fresh install works today because new version (apparently with the fix) was pushed to repo; I did apt update this morning and new version 4.2.2406.48 doesn't have this problem.

Sending love to Vivaldi team once again for the great work

TbGbe · Win: Snapshot Vivaldi 7.4.3671.3

@npro A new update for Stable fixes this problem for "new" users - same problem but different cause https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/minor-update-4-2/

npro

@tbgbe Linux Pop!_OS

TbGbe · Win: Snapshot Vivaldi 7.4.3671.3

@npro

anstapa

@themagican I re-installed, 4.2.2406.48 fixed the issue for me. Thanks.

micho102

@guigirl I Think I installed Vivaldi simply with "pacman -S vivaldi" and the system didn't prompt me to install vivaldi-ffmpeg-codecs. So it was not installed until yesterday. But it is possible that the error 'Vivaldi lacks a suitable component to play HTML5 'proprietary' media (H.264/AAC)' appeared also before the last update. I simply did not noticed it. Sorry about that. But thanks for asking.
Everything is fine now ( I think).

Ruarí

@guigirl said in H.264/AAC broken in the last update:

otherwise you'd have always had that error: Vivaldi lacks a suitable component to play HTML5 'proprietary' media (H.264/AAC)

No you wouldn't. The package helps only as a fallback in case the third party URLs we use expire which has happened a few times of late for reasons I will not go into here (though this has only happened to stable users once in the last couple of years). The overwhelming majority of users do not have a package like this installed (they are not even provided on most distributions) and yet do not encounter problems. You generally do not need vivaldi-ffmpeg-codecs at all.

Ruarí

@anstapa Then run this and tell me what it states

/opt/vivaldi/update-ffmpeg --user

Ruarí

@themagican Your purge was not needed. If it worked after that but did not before it is a result of networking issues after the first attempt at upgrade meaning it did not download correctly the first time around. Removing/purging makes no difference and should not be needed by anyone else reading this.

Ruarí

@npro said in H.264/AAC broken in the last update:

it just placed it under ~/.local/lib/... for non .deb/.rpm distros and under /var/opt/... for OpenSUSE (and others I guess) after a browser relaunch.

Very close but not quite. The difference between these locations is actually about how and when the support script is

Called
Runs successfully

In the deb/rpm the script (and some repacks, e.g. Slackware) the script is run as root in post install. In these cases the libfmpeg file is placed in /var/opt for all users. If it is not called in post install by some unofficial package or due to networking issues it fails in post install, then the startup wrapper will attempt to fix the situation by calling the script on startup of Vivaldi. In those cases the lib is installed in ~/.local/lib on a per user basis.

Ruarí

@tbgbe Not a different problem. It is fixing exactly this problem. That is the main reason the update was put out.