Vivaldi + PepperFlash
 

I have problems with Vivaldi and Pepperflash. First of all, I can't get any diagnostics on Flash plugin, any status information. Extensions page says I have no extensions. However, I don't know if PepperFlash is even supposed to be listed there, strictly it is a plugin rather than extensions. Tried searching the web, no luck.

Flash does not play, and I am unable to see what is going on there.

I have installed latest Vivaldi from RPM (rpm2tgz). Took a brief look at the Slackbuild script, and it looks like mostly download related stuff, icon cache update, etc., so I thought RPM might do.

I have Chromium PepperFlash installed and it works with Chromium. Worked with Opera, too.

Also noticed that there is a 'lib' directory under /opt/vivaldi, and there is a ffmpeg shared library in it. ldd does not list libffmpeg.so as missing. Nevertheless, tried to add 'lib' directory to LD_LIBRARY_PATH, no effect. Tried to symlink Pepperflash .so to Vivaldi dir and lib dir, no effect.

Only thing I noticed is an error thrown into terminal, when started from it. It says:
MediaEvent: MEDIA_ERROR_LOG_ENTRY {"error":"FFmpegDemuxer: open context failed"}

Tried download vivaldi-ffmpeg-codecs from Slackbuilds for 14.2, but the link is broken. Also I have NPAPI Flashplayer plugin installed, and I wonder if Vivaldi tries to load it for some stupid reason.

Youtube videos are playing fine, but, I guess it is pure HTML5 video.

If there is someone out there who has Vivaldi+Pepperflah working, please tell me how to find out if plugin is found, recognized and loaded in the first place.

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UPDATE
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I have solved the Flash playback issue. Playback is very smooth. A custom version of libffmpeg.so needs to be built. The script to build it can be found here:

https://gist.github.com/ruario/bec42d156d30affef655

However, still there I can't find any information on plugin status. Any other browser which I tried provides that information. At least is plugin loaded or not and file path from which it was loaded. It is more like Vivaldi, rather than Slackware issue. However, I am not going to mark this solved yet, hoping that someone might provide more information.

I know with FireFox and some sights that have video of one of FireFox default path search for pepperflash this is one and this is how I hack fixed it

get a hold of this
flash_player_ppapi_linux.x86_64.tar.gz
untar it and get the .so out of it.

If you go to the Tools Menu and you click on Plugins, you should see an
entry for Adobe Flash Player that shows its version number

The 'Plugins' page has disappeared in the newer version. If you click Menu > Help > About, you'll see the plugins there.

PS and by the way, you can download the latest ppapi version of flash from adobe.

Thanks Petelq, I found it. I guess plugin page is gone because browser plugins are considered "evil". Flash was considered "evil", too, but recently all browsers extended support for Flash plugins. I guess it got "rehabilitated"...

Hi, I am Ruarí. I am a slacker and have been for a number of years (I used to be quite active on this forum). I work for Vivaldi as a tester and have worked in the past for Opera in a similar role.

On Slackware, the most commonly used used package to provide "libpepflashplayer.so" is chromium-pepperflash-plugin (from AlienBOB). Indeed the SlackDocs article on Flash mentions this very package for Chromium based browsers and it would also seem (from your very first statement) that you are aware that Vivaldi uses Pepper Flash.

AlienBob's chromium-pepperflash-plugin would place libpepflashplayer.so in /usr/lib/chromium/PepperFlash (for 32bit) or /usr/lib64/chromium/PepperFlash (for 64bit). These are two of the directories where Vivaldi will search for Pepper Flash.

Thus to have Flash working in Vivaldi on Slackware all you need do is install chromium-pepperflash-plugin (from AlienBOB).

If you would like to confirm that you have Flash installed and working and it is the version you expect, simply load http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ as explained on the relevant Vivaldi help page https://help.vivaldi.com/article/ins...r-for-vivaldi/. Pressing "F1" in Vivaldi calls up the help database, which can searched just like in many other graphical programs. That same help page also states:

I should also mention that that script would automate fetching and installing PepperFlash into one of the other directories where Vivaldi can find it (/usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin).

This seems odd to me. How did you install it (what package did you use)? What is the status of the Vivaldi setting "Webpages → Plugins → Flash Plugin" (is it enabled)? What does vivaldi://about/ state for "Flash"?

You have gone down a complete blind alley with this. Pepper Flash and libffmpeg have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

That is what the libffmpeg.so does. It plays HTML5 video (not flash video)

No you do not need a custom version of libffmpeg.so. That is completely an uttterly wrong. You need a custom version of libffmpeg.so if you wish to play back "proprietary" HTML5 MP4 (H.264/AAC) video and MP3 audio.

Indeed the very gist you linked to is written by me and states, quite clearly:

Those instructions being the very ones I linked to above and the ones linked to on the Vivaldi help page.

Having read your complete request my guess would be that you were never after Flash at all but instead working "proprietary" HTML5 video and audio, which is why the gist that helps you install a replacement libffmpeg.so worked for you.

P.S. For anyone reading this who does want to know more about Vivaldi and Flash the short summary is. Install chromium-pepperflash-plugin (from AlienBOB) and confirm things are working via http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/. If you later wish to disable flash in Vivaldi without removing chromium-pepperflash-plugin, we also have a setting here "Webpages → Plugins → Flash Plugin".

P.P.S. For the very curious, these are all the directories where Vivaldi will look for the Pepper Flash plugin (libpepflashplayer.so)

I can confirm that this would have worked perfectly, given that /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash is one of the directories we look.

Indeed because third party plugins are on their way out (not to be confused with extensions, which are still very much supported)

Good point! Something I forgot to mention myself! (I have edited it into my posting now)

which would have also worked for the op ;)

Of course I know who you are :-) Pleased to meet you. Thanks for the clarifications, but you need to understand that those who put media on their pages rarely provide technical details about it. If it works, fine, if not, you are in trouble.

I am not expert on Flash, however, it does more than one thing. There is a media playback capability and there is scripting language, "Actionscript" or something. One is often confronted with what they call a player, a component which provide volume control, play and pause controls, skip forward and backward controls, sometimes even subtitles upload form. It seems that those players often need Flash to run, although content itself could be played without it. Few years ago we were told that Javascript was supposed to handle everything, including playback controls, but those player components still won't run without Flash. Perhaps they are coded in Actionscript, I don't know. Or perhaps it is something about security restrictions, when player is hosted at one domain and content at the other.

I agree with your statements, but, in general case, you need both, Flash and proprietary codecs, in order to watch something on the web. That is why I tried to establish if Flash plugin was found, recognized and loaded before moving to next step. Next step was to make sure that I have all the necessary codecs. Good people on this forum pointed me to "Help/About" menu entry. Your own script helped me with codecs, and now I am good.

This depends on the site. Most of the sites I used worked fine without flash. I haven't installed flash on my systems for a few years and I haven't ran into playback issues on Firefox because of a lack of flash for most of the sites I frequent. (Chrome almost always "just works". It is my normal browser, but on a system I may not use a browser frequently, like my htpc, I just stick with the official Slackware Firefox package.)

doesn't chrome always includes their flash plugin so even though you were not aware of it yes you were using flash plugins. Because Chrome adds theirs in their install.

Yes, that's why I mentioned that Chrome always works. But on machines I don't install Chrome (usually ones I'll only do limited web browsing on), I just use the Firefox supplied by Slackware. On those machines, I don't install flash. There's still plenty of sites that would play content without requiring flash.

So many sites now are using the <video></video> tags from the html5 spec, which does not require flash to work.

thank you for making that perfectly clear.

I find curious how everyone has written the Flash off, announced the end of it and (verbally) pooped on it. Then, suddenly, Flash is back. Adobe resumed development of NPAPI Flashplayer and released several new versions. Everyone keeps quiet on it, nobody comments it.

I'd say there is something important which can't be done with HTML5 + CSS + Javascript. I am familiar with web programing and I'd say it isn't about page design or scripting. More likely there is something about video streaming. Unfortunately, I don't know much about it.

Considering Frefox, I had performance issues while playing videos. Until recently, when I updated ffmpeg. Most of the videos I watch are MP4. I am using Firefox ESR, rather than latest release. I thought, finally, Firefox works wright, and then I heard that they are dropping ALSA support. I suppose it is time to pick another browser. Vivaldi is a pleasant surprise.

In my case, I realized that flash wasn't a requirement for me anymore. Plus, it's kinda unfortunate that Adobe basically dropped support for Linux (except for including it within Chrome) for quite some time and only recently backpedaled.