How To Get Flash And H.264 To Work In Opera Browser (Ubuntu 14.04, 14.10 and 15.04)

Opera 26 (stable) was released for Linux today and if you've tried it, you might have noticed that, at least on a pretty fresh Ubuntu installation, Flash and H.264 don't work.

So here's how to get Flash and H.264 (used for instance by the YouTube HTML5 player) to work with Opera on Ubuntu. The instructions below should work for all Opera (26 or newer) channels: stable, beta and developer.

How to get Flash working in Opera (Ubuntu)

Opera for Linux supports Pepper Flash, but it's not bundled with it. This part of the article was updated, and now to get Flash working in Opera, all you have to do is install the adobe-flashplugin package from the Canonical Partner repository.

1. Enable the Canonical Partner repository

To do this, open Software & Updates, and on the "Other Software" tab, enable "Canonical Partners". Then click "Close", and when asked to reload the software sources, click the "Reload" button.

2. Install adobe-flashplugin:

sudo apt-get install adobe-flashplugin

How to enable H.264 in Opera browser under Ubuntu

To enable H.264 in Opera on Linux, you'll need FFmpeg 2.3 or newer. FFmpeg was removed a while back from the official Ubuntu repositories but it has returned with Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet (currently under development). Update: in Ubuntu 15.04, Opera should support H.264 out of the box.

For Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10, you can either compile FFmpeg yourself or use A PPA. One such PPA is Kyrill's FFmpeg next PPA, which provides FFmpeg for Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10, backported from Ubuntu 15.04. 

Because this PPA provides FFmpeg packages that don't overwrite Libav, it shouldn't break anything on your system (the new FFmpeg packages ships with renamed libraries, like "libavdevice-ffmpeg", "libavutil-ffmpeg" and so on, so the packages can coexist with Libav from the Ubuntu repositories).

Note: before using this PPA, make sure the "ffmpeg-real" package from Sam Rog's PPA isn't installed, because the two aren't compatible and dpkg will throw an error like: "trying to overwrite [...] which is also in package". So, to remove this package, use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove ffmpeg-real

And another note: Kyrill's FFmpeg next PPA as well as FFmpeg from the Ubuntu 15.04 repositories doesn't provide the -extra packages, so aac encoding is limited to ffmpeg's native encoder, like Doug mentioned in a comment a while back. However, this won't affect Opera.

To add Kyrill's FFmpeg next PPA and install FFmpeg in Ubuntu 14.04 or 14.10 (or Linux Mint 17 or 17.1), use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kirillshkrogalev/ffmpeg-next
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

And then simply restart Opera.

Another PPA which provides FFmpeg (for Ubuntu 14.04 only; this PPA overwrites Libav and I didn't test the consequences of this) is Jon Severinsson's FFmpeg PPA.