Download Tools: How To Get Flash And H 264 To Work In Vivaldi Browser Ubuntu Linux Mint

Sunday, March 5, 2017

How To Get Flash And H 264 To Work In Vivaldi Browser Ubuntu Linux Mint

Vivaldi 1.0 stable was released today and if you gave it a try, you might have noticed, at least on a fresh Ubuntu installation, that Flash and H.264 dont work out of the box.

Heres how to get Adobe Flash and H.264 (used, for instance, by the YouTube HTML5 player) to work with Vivaldi browser, in Ubuntu, Linux Mint and derivatives.

Get Vivaldi browser to support H.264

Before installing "chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra"

After installing "chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra"

To enable H.264 support for Vivaldi in Ubuntu, you need to install a package called "chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra".

This is already available if Chromium browser is installed on your system. If you dont have Chromium browser, you can install the package that provides H.264 support by using the following command:

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

And restart Vivaldi.

You can check if your browser supports H.264 by visiting the YouTube HTML5 page.

Get Adobe Flash working in Vivaldi Browser

Important note: since Google Chrome is now only available for 64bit on Linux, it means that its Pepper Flash plugin is also only available on 64bit. So the instructions below only work on 64bit! Flash might work on Vivaldi 32bit if you have an old Google Chrome for 32bit installed, but it wont receive any updates so you shouldnt use it.

Vivaldi supports the Google Chrome built-in Pepper Flash plugin, but it doesnt come bundled with it. If you have Google Chrome installed on your system, Vivaldi should already be using its Pepper Flash plugin, so theres nothing you need to do.

If Google Chrome is not installed on your system, to get Vivaldi browser to use the Google Chrome Pepper Flash plugin, you can install a package called "pepperflashplugin-nonfree".

The package is available in Ubuntu 14.04, 15.04, 14.10 and 16.04 / Linux Mint 17.x and derivatives and you can install it by using the following command:

sudo apt-get install pepperflashplugin-nonfree

Then restart Vivaldi. Thats it!

Update: the bug that caused pepperflashplugin-nonfree not to work in Ubuntu 16.04 was fixed.

Extra tip:

If Google Chrome is installed, Vivaldi will automatically pick up its Widevine Content Decryption plugin (it comes with a symbolic link to the location of the libwidevinecdm.so plugin in the Google Chrome stable installation folder).

If you dont want to install Google Chrome and you need this plugin, you can extract libwidevinecdm.so from the Google Chrome deb and place it in /opt/vivaldi/, replacing the existing symbolic link.

thanks to B.Jay for the tip!

Available link for download