Play Vimeo Movies with Opera on Linux

I installed OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 a few weeks ago and I'm using it as my daily machine. Being a web developer I use a lot of open-source AND proprietary software as well.

Talking about browsers, I’m surfing with Yandex for my personal use and coding, and recently Opera instead of Edge for my professional work with more CPU & memory-intensive tasks like video conferences with Google Meets. ☁️ _____☁️ _☁️☁️🛼

The H264 Hitch

One of the issues is default browsers in Linux can't read some popular codecs like h26x used with popular streaming services. Regards to policies and legal restrictions the codecs are often provided in the "Restricted" or "Non-Free" channel of your Linux distribution.

🛟 And for my safety, I always avoid activating those channels and install manually the few missing packages I need.

Firefox

With OpenMandriva, playing YouTube or Vimeo movies in Firefox should work first try. If not, you can try installing the additional mozilla-openh264 package.

ChromeKit

Chrome-based browsers are using extra chromium codecs. There are a few debs & rpms packages available on the net for you to do that. Mostly it’s a custom version of libffmpeg, a famous library to work with media. The issue is, that browsers are still updated regularly even with a stable release and you need to perform the action over and over again.

Post Intall Scripts

Instead of using this extra package or redo your custom fix, you can automatically fix it thanks to this script found on the Opera forum. This will create a script that will be executed every time specific browsers are installed or upgraded. Missing ffmpeg tools will be fetched and installed, and the path will be adjusted.

Step 1: OpenMandriva Dependencies

You need the following packages

sudo dnf install wget unzip git python-dnf-plugin-post-transaction-actions

Step 2: Download the script

Chekout the code from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/Ld-Hagen/fix-opera-linux-ffmpeg-widevine.git

Step 3: Run the script

cd ./fix-opera-linux-ffmpeg-widevine
sudo ./install.sh

You will have to answer a few questions and you are good to go! Now if you restart your browser and go to Vimeo you should able to watch the video. The "patch" should work for other webkit-based browsers.

Bonus

Watch this awesome documentary about the feeling of riding a skateboard. 🛹

As a retired skateboarder I couldn't do a better job of expressing the mood of freedom and happiness in sliding a piece of wood through the city.

Hope you enjoy this tutorial and stay tuned for the next episode.