Netflix and primevideo works on chrome, but not on Opera. Widevinecdm component not found but the .so file is present

Question

There have been questions similar to this, but they were for an older version (which was fixed) and those solutions did not work. Hence, a new question. I have ubuntu 18.04 and the latest version of google chrome (71). I tried using Netflix and primevideo on Opera but it threw an error asking me to enable Widevine Content Decryption Module in opera://plugins. I figured it uses google chrome's libwidevine.so and checked in chrome://components but the module was not listed.

I tried installing google chrome from the official website and through apt install. But neither of them had the component and Opera didn't recognize the .so file present in chrome's folder.

I also tested using the castlabs but the player does not load in opera.

Note: Firefox has no problem in playing DRM content.

Answer 1

Amazon Prime Video on Ubuntu 16/18 LTS and Opera should work. However, you'll need to copy the libffmpeg.so 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 and Amazon Prime Video without any additional plugins.

However, if you ever update Opera (i.e. system updates), then you'll need to rerun the above code again.