14 DAY TRIAL // A fresh Opera stable update has been released, but it’s a really small one. The developers have made some changes to get Netflix running, although they still haven’t made things easy.
Opera is based on Chromium, and since Google Chrome has no problem with Netflix, the same doesn’t happen for Opera. This is an annoying problem for Opera users who really want to also watch Netflix, and the developers are aware of this. The latest update was released to fix this particular issue, but that hasn’t happened all the way through.
The problem with Netflix happens just to Linux users, but that’s nothing new. In fact, Netflix engineers contacted the Ubuntu developers a while back to tell them what library to get in order to have native access to the service with Google Chrome. Unfortunately, that solution doesn't extend to Opera, and we still have a long way to go until we are able to properly use Netflix.
Netflix works on Opera for Linux, sort of
Developers said in the announcement that this is an important version since it takes care of the Netflix issues, but that’s not the case, and they even link to one of the comments, coming from a user, that completes the instructions. He explained what was needed to make it work.
“1. Compatible widevine libraries (see /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera-beta/resources/widevine_config.json for search paths, version 48.x). Some distros have a separate package for it with some custom installation dir 2. FFMpeg with h264 support (e.g. chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra version 48.x) 3. fake user agent to Chromium (--user-agent command line switch).
This version 48 is determined by chromium version our product is based on, major version mismatches sometimes work, but no guarantee.”
As you can see, even if the Opera devs have reported that the DNA-40876 bug is fixed and that Netflix should work, users still need to do a little bit of magic. A second fix was implemented for the Turbo function.
You can download the latest Opera for Linux from Softpedia, and the Windows and Mac OS X versions can be downloaded from the same page.