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Since Opera (56.0) has released a very nice new free VPN feature, I wanted to try it to watch Netflix based on a different location than my own.

Based on the error message I received, it seems that Opera doesn't support HTML5, Silverlight 4 or Silverlight 5 on Linux distributions, and the work-arounds used in the past have either been deprecated (Pipelight), simply don't work any longer (Widevine) or require you to use a different browser or a VM. I have seen some mention of extensions that switch the user agent, but none that seem to be legitimate enough that I want to dare downloading it.

Is there any clean cut solution to this problem?

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    It won't work anyway, Netflix detects that you are using a VPN or proxy and refuses to play anything. Yes, I am sad too.
    – Organic Marble
    Oct 30, 2018 at 12:12
  • Does this only happen once you try to play the actual video? Because it shows me viewing options that I definitely don't have normally.
    – alecvn
    Oct 30, 2018 at 16:19
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    Yes, at least that's what happened to me. I was presented with an exciting menu of shows not available in my home country, but when I tried to watch one, got an error message. Just tried it again and yep, no joy.
    – Organic Marble
    Oct 30, 2018 at 17:01
  • Well thank you for saving me the trouble then! If you want to formulate this into some kind of answer of the original question I'd be happy to accept it.
    – alecvn
    Oct 30, 2018 at 19:44
  • Somehow Opera's VPN is able to bypass the Netflix's VPN detection, so it actually works. I can confirm this because I've been using Opera's VPN for a couple days now and it works smoothly. But, I am using windows 10 to use Opera browser, although it should work in Ubuntu also.
    – Madhav Thakker
    Dec 30, 2018 at 13:24

4 Answers 4

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Edit with updated info -

As of September 2019, you can in fact use the built-in VPN in Opera to watch European Netflix from the USA.

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Netflix on Ubuntu 16/18 LTS and Opera should work fine. However, you'll need to copy the libffmpeg file from Google Chrome. Albeit Opera is built on Chromium, Opera does not contain all proprietary files due to licensing issues. You can fix this by installing Google Chrome alongside Opera, then running the command

sudo cp /usr/lib/chromium-browser/libffmpeg.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera/libffmpeg.so

This will allow you to watch Netflix. Now regarding the VPN, that's a whole different issue. Netflix has zoning restrictions so you'll have to experiment with that on your own.

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As of July 2021 you Definitely can NOT use Opera VPN to connect to Netflix. Not from N. America to Europe/Asia that is. It might allow it for a short period of time, as was my experience testing with multiple accounts, all of which were quickly thwarted by Netflix. From my first VPN sign-in, on any of three accounts, the average time it took Netflix to bust me was about 5 minutes. I almost got half-way thru a Rick & Morty episode, on my longest & first (coincidence? Doubt it) attempt. The final attempt w/the 3rd account was about 2 mins. All of this was from the same PC tho, & that's telling us that Opera's VPN is leaky, which is not surprise considering it's not actually a VPN, it's kind of a proxy to a VPN, & Netflix can easily figure this out these days. You're gonna have to cough-up cash to get Global Netflix action in 2021

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So by default Opera may throw O7355 or similar error. This means that you are missing correct Widevine install. First, try opening opera://components and upddating Widewine (on the bottom). If that doesn't work, then the steps to resolve that on linux would be to install Chrome e.g.

wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

And then copy Widewine in the Opera folder:

sudo cp -r /opt/google/chrome/WidevineCdm /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera/WidewineCdm

After that restart Opera. This made the Netflix run for me on Opera on Linux with "Opera VPN" enabled.

To be fair before this I also installed following, but not sure if that has any effect

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