Opera supports the WebM video format

Opera supports the WebM video format

Today is a very significant day for the Web. WebM, a new, high-quality, free, and open video format is now available, and Opera has released Labs builds that support this format in HTML5 <video>. In this article, we look at some examples, how this came about, why it is such a good thing, and what the technical details look like.

( Read the article )

WebM offers high-quality video with fast seeking.

The seeking (to the parts not yet loaded) is the thing that does not work at least on youtube right now... And video quality is bad... It seems that encoder being used skips frames often... Some videos got corrupted...

It is very frustrating that after installing Opera's build which reportedly has WebM support Youtube still fails to acknowledge that I am indeed eligible to watch WebM videos. It is even more frustrating when I only have to update my Chromium installation and automatically have WebM videos working.

Is there something I'm doing wrong? I simply installed the build Opera posted, I'm running 32-bit Lucid Lynx fully updated.

edit: I should also add that even Opera's own example pages fail to work.

Originally posted by chrismills:

Originally posted by AJCF:

It is very frustrating that after installing Opera's build which reportedly has WebM support Youtube still fails to acknowledge that I am indeed eligible to watch WebM videos. It is even more frustrating when I only have to update my Chromium installation and automatically have WebM videos working.

Is there something I'm doing wrong? I simply installed the build Opera posted, I'm running 32-bit Lucid Lynx fully updated.

I have just tested all our examples again, on both Mac and (32-bit, 10.0.4 Ubuntu) Linux, and they work for me on both. The Linux versions are a bit slower and jerkier than the Mac versions right now, but do remember that these are rough and ready labs builds, and a lot more improvements and optimizations will go into both the browsers and the video format/tools before a final release is done.

As for YouTube, again, wfm, I'm afraid. Have you definitely opted in to the HTML5 beta at http://www.youtube.com/html5?

Yes, I have. It is very weird indeed, specially since Chromium works flawlessly for me. Is there some kind of troubleshooting I can do on my end?

Originally posted by chrismills:

Originally posted by AJCF:

Yes, I have. It is very weird indeed, specially since Chromium works flawlessly for me. Is there some kind of troubleshooting I can do on my end?

I'd be more than happy to help you get to the bottom of this.

So you are trying to 32-bit Linux build, on Ubuntu 10.04? How did you install it? By double clicking on the "install" script inside the archive file and running it?

Can you describe the problem in more detail? What exactly happens? Do you get any kind of error message? Does the video run, but it looks like crap? Does the video player UI (the controls, etc.) load, but no video is shown in the UI? Or do you see nothing at all?

Yes, I am. I ran it from a terminal, after using sudo apt-get to remove the previous version of Opera and deleting the .opera folder in my home folder..

This is my uname -a output:

Linux hostname 2.6.32-22-generic #33-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 28 13:27:30 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

Basically the player shows up but I get a message instead of the video saying:

Your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available.
Click here to visit our frequently asked questions about HTML5 video.

I have the same problem on PCLinux2009 .

Your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available.

I see the player controls, but I only get the above message on the screen, and a link to YouTube's HTML5 "opt-in" page, and I AM in the HTML5 beta.

Opera Version:10.54 Internal
Build:21867
Platform:Linux
System: i686, 2.6.26.8.tex3

yes, I know my system isn't Ubuntu, but I've been using Opera for nearly a decade,
and the last 3 or 4 builds have been fine, and so is this one, except it doesn't seem to want to play WebM videos (flash videos still play).

do I need to install a install the codec on my system ?
do I need to set up a MIME type ?
is there a difference between Ubuntu and other distros regarding vp8 ?

@b0mber

Try to play WebM videos with the latest Chromium daily build, at least that way you can narrow the problem down.

I can't build Chromium from source on this computer,
and according to their site, there won't be any binary packages for a week or so,
but I installed the latest Firefox test build and it seems to play WebM videos just fine

Can't you use Chromium daily's build PPA, though? That's how I did it.

Originally posted by chrismills:

Hi guys,

Thanks for the info about the Linux build. I'm currently talking to the developers about these problems, to see if I can get a resolution for you.

Thanks for the help. I really appreciate it, even though it feels funny to get official support for a product that's esentially free.

I'll subscribe to the topic, cheers.

Originally posted by chrismills:

Originally posted by AJCF:

Thanks for the help. I really appreciate it, even though it feels funny to get official support for a product that's esentially free.

I'll subscribe to the topic, cheers.

Glad to help!

One suggestion I have so far - can you give us the output of "dpkg -s libc6 | grep Version"?

Version: 2.11.1-0ubuntu7

Ok - I've got a very quick answer for you!

The problem in is that the libraries require a very new version of libc (2.11), which only very recent distros have. This will be solved when we get it integrated into our build system.

Thanks for your help,
My libc version is 2.10.1, and there is no later version available for my distro, so I guess I'm out of luck for now .

Any recent developments?

I still can't get Webm to work, if you need any more info let me know. Cheers.

Small update: I uninstalled the 10.54 build, and I'm now using the latest 10.60 alpha. On Youtube, the HTML5+WebM player appears but the video doesn't load (I've been waiting for several minutes now for that video showcasing Opera 10.50 to load but to no avail).

Out of your own example pages, I can only get this one to work: http://people.opera.com/patrickl/experiments/webm/fancy-swap/

Is this helpful?

Does anyone know about some free! online! FLV to WebM converter?

Originally posted by BS-Harou:

Does anyone know about some free! online! FLV to WebM converter?

Miro Video Converter, however, it is not an online app.

I still see this issue when using openSUSE 11.3 and Opera 10.61. Switching to opera-10.70-9044.i386.linux doesn't help.

Packages in openSUSE 11.3 I have installed:

glibc-2.11.2-3.1.1.i686
glibc-devel-2.11.2-3.1.1.i686
glibc-i18ndata-2.11.2-3.1.1.i586
glibc-locale-2.11.2-3.1.1.i586

I checked for Opera's output in console and I don't see anything, not even sth like:
undefined symbol: g_realloc_n" and "version `GLIBC_2.11' not found

No idea what causes this problem :|

Originally posted by chrismills:

Originally posted by Zajec:

I still see this issue when using openSUSE 11.3 and Opera 10.61. Switching to opera-10.70-9044.i386.linux doesn't help.

Hi there Zajec - which issue do you mean? I just wanted to be clear on it, so I can answer your questions as helpfully as possible. Cheers!

I can see YouTube's HTML5 (WebM) player but movie just keeps loading. I've been waiting for 10 minutes and still got only that loading icon in the center for black player's screen.

P.S.
http://img547.imageshack.us/i/operahtml5webmyoutube.png/