Opera browser does not play video from Netflix or HBO GO

Few days ago I started my journey with Opera Browser on Ubuntu 20.04. I decided to do that to increase time of work on battery and because Opera looks really beautifully. Opera has great optimization in power consumption which really works. Check this comparison.

I noticed only one huge problem with Opera. You can not watch Netflix, HBO GO and some other videos online. For example Netflix return error O7355 which means this browser is not supported to display video content.

Unfortunately this is not a technical issue but a legal one and wait for next update won’t help. Luckily there is a workaround! To fix this issue you have to change libffmpeg.so from one which comes with Opera to the Chromium version.

If you installed chromium already you can check if you have this file available in one of this places:

• /snap/chromium/current/usr/lib/chromium-browser/libffmpeg.so
• /usr/lib/chromium-browser/libffmpeg.so

If not or version of your libffmpeg codec does not fixed problem you can install latest codec using snap:

snap install chromium-ffmpeg

and then copy /snap/chromium-ffmpeg/current/chromium-ffmpeg-{version}/chromium-ffmpeg/libffmpeg.so and replace version comes with Opera: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera/libffmpeg.so

sudo cp /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera/libffmpeg.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera/libffmpeg.so.tmp
sudo cp /snap/chromium-ffmpeg/current/chromium-ffmpeg-{version}/chromium-ffmpeg/libffmpeg.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera/

Remember to change {version} to your installed version of codec.

This workaround solve problem with video player in Opera browser.