Youtube live video not working in Opera (and Chromium)

Question

This proble affects Opera and Chromium browsers but not Google Chrome and Fitefox; it has something to do with html5 video streaming, not flash, as it affects live streaming in Youtube. - Only, incidentally, some other internet video doesn't work either, namely Tweeter videos (whether live or not) - but that may be a separate issue.

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I am in Loki up-to-date and talking about the following browsers updated at the date of this post:

Opera   52.0.2871.40
Chromium 49.0.2623
Firefox 59.0.2
Google Chrome 65.0.3325.181

Answer 1

This problem is to be put in the context of browser html5 support, more specifically support for h264 streams (which affected much more than Youtube live streams). That seems to be lacking at the date of these posts in both Chromium and Opera but can be solved only separately.

For Chromium:

sudo apt-get install chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra

which will remove chromium-codecs-ffmpeg if already installed.

For Opera:

1. Go to opera://about/ and look for the relevant Chromium version.

2. Download from here the corresponding version of chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra

3. Extract the archive.

4. Copy the libffmpeg.so file (with the file manager as administrator or in terminal) to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera replacing the already existing file if needed.

(This is different from a solution on which it is loosely based. Location is different and no renaming of the file was done.)

This was first answered here, also here.

The libffmpeg.so file can be also found in the package opera-ffmpeg-codecs here and here, and it can be also put in a new folder /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera/lib_extra/.

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The above may need be repeated depending whether updates replace the libffmpeg.so file or require a new one corresponding to a newer Chrome version.