The following is a quick guide to get this working on various Linux distros. As a side note, if you have Chrome installed alongside Vivaldi, Netflix should also work after making these changes. Alternatively, use my latest-widevine.sh to fetch and extract Chrome's copy of Widevine, so that it can be used by Vivaldi.
If you don't have working Flash video and need that in addition, please refer to these instructions.
Note: This guide is primarily aimed at users of Vivaldi stable releases. If it does not solve your issues, read this in addition.
sudo apt update && sudo apt install chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra
You will now need to restart Vivaldi. You can then test support on this page.
If you want to use the latest stable, install vivaldi and vivaldi-ffmpeg-codecs.
If you want to use the latest snapshot, install vivaldi-snapshot and vivaldi-snapshot-ffmpeg-codecs.
Alternatively, you can also get both of these packages from from the unofficial [herecura] repo.
Note: Do not use the herecura repo, if you use related distros like Chakra and Manjaro. These are not real “Arch Linux” and have differences that are great enough, that you are likely to encounter problems (if not right away, then some time in the future).
After installing from the AUR or the linked unofficial repository, will now need to restart Vivaldi. You can then test support on this page.
If your distro does not provide a package with a suitable library or one is not detected, you can run the script ./latest-proprietary-media.sh
(included with this gist) as your normal user (not root) to fetch and install the Ubuntu file. Once installed, simply restart Vivaldi. You can then test support on this page.
If you would prefer not use a script, here is a short summary of how to do this manually.
First, have a look in http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/c/chromium-browser/ for a “chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra” package from Ubuntu 16.04.
Fetch it like so (adjusting the package name as needed):
wget http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/c/chromium-browser/chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra_66.0.3359.181-0ubuntu0.16.04.1_amd64.deb
To Extract out the lib and install it for Vivaldi's usage, enter the following (adjusting the package name as needed):
ar p chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra_66.0.3359.181*.deb data.tar.xz | tar Jx ./usr/lib/chromium-browser/libffmpeg.so --strip 4
install -Dm644 libffmpeg.so "$HOME/.local/lib/vivaldi/libffmpeg.so"
Next time you restart Vivaldi it should find this library and use it to decode proprietary media.
If you want to build your own replacement libffmpeg use the Arch vivaldi-snapshot-ffmpeg-codecs PKGBUILD as a guide.
If you are a maintainer and intend to repackage Vivaldi browser for your distro, you might want to consider making vivaldi-ffmpeg-codecs or vivaldi-snapshot-ffmpeg-codecs packages containing a replacement libffmpeg.so library. It is suggested that you place this library in the directory /opt/vivaldi/
or /opt/vivaldi-snapshot/
directories respectively. You will need to update these packages from time to time as Vivaldi ups its Chromium version.