I have been contacted by the Opera developers who are requesting a store exception to auto-connect chromium-ffmpeg-93464 for opera, opera-beta and opera-developer.
This is because they have noticed that Opera cannot play H.264 videos anymore.
Thanks @Wimpress for posting this. I am the Opera developer who requested the auto-connect exception.
@oSoMoN I am wondering why chromium-ffmpeg-91124 was removed in reversion 11 at the first place?
As we discussed before, by switching to snap package, we are hoping that a given version of ffmpeg codec will be always available, unlike its .deb counterpart, which can break Opera when the package is updated. However, this still happens and caught us off guard. With snap package, it’s more inconvenient to us since a codec update also requires the auto-connect exception.
Also, we noticed that some of our developers cannot revert their chromium-ffmpeg package to revision 8 as a workaround. Is the revert option only available when an old package is in local?
Thanks for taking care of this.
Best,
Xiaxing
Ouch! I’m sorry that the removal of chromium-ffmpeg-91124 affected opera, I didn’t anticipate that…
This was done because when adding newer versions of the codecs to the snap, the build would use too much space and hang forever, so I cleaned up the oldest versions of the codec from the snap.
I should obviously have checked with opera and other well-known browser snaps before doing that, apologies for failing to do that.
I am going to look into tidying up the chromium-ffmpeg snap build to ensure it doesn’t use up too much space and we can keep older versions of the codecs around for much longer.
In the meantime, store moderators please accept the auto-connection to fix my mistake.
I have pushed a change to clean up source and build areas after building each part, a build that restores the removed parts is currently running. As soon as it’s done I’ll test it and publish.
Done, chromium-ffmpeg-91124 and chromium-ffmpeg-91696 are back in the stable channel. Really sorry for the inconvenience again.
@xshi: I’ve installed opera from the stable channel (revision 31), and the chromium-ffmpeg-91124 interface was auto-connected, and I could successfully play some H264 videos. Can you confirm the issue is resolved?
@Wimpress: I’ll be very careful next time I intend to remove existing plugs from chromium-ffmpeg. In such an event, is there a way to list the consumers of a plug?
But why Opera use ffmpeg-91124 slot only? Opera (stable) based on Chromium 71. Opera-beta based on Chromium 73. Opera-dev based on Chromium 74.
chromium-ffmpeg-91124 it’s something about 71. But all this versions have chromium-ffmpeg-91124 slot in snapraft.yaml configuration.
PS: https://forums.opera.com/topic/31504/broken-autoconnection-with-chromium-ffmpeg-in-snap-version/3
Thanks, we also tested it and Opera stable and Opera Beta work again. I didn’t try Opera Developer from the store since I am using internal build with slot chromium-ffmpeg-93464.
It’s mainly because it’s still working.
We are syncing up this in our binary by allowing new codecs for the .deb package. In other words, the new codecs in new slot should be already compatible with Opera.
However, for our snap version, I don’t see much benefit on updating the slot version as long as it’s still available. Otherwise, we will have to request for store exceptions more often.
Speaking about this, will it be possible to have an auto-connect exception for all slots in chromium-ffmpeg? If so, it will definitely encourage us to update the codec in snap version more frequently.
There isn’t a mechanism for this exception to grant auto-connection automatically functionality since an updated snap declaration would need to be generated by a human.
Considering that, I’m unclear on the status of this request? I’m happy to update the snap declaration for something newer if desired, but it sounds like the snap is functioning again and nothing is needed.
It’s working again because @oSoMoN restored chromium-ffmpeg-91124. And please setup the auto-connect exception for chromium-ffmpeg-93464 because we are going to release new opera-developer with this slot version. Thanks.
Looking more closely at the chromium-ffmpeg snap, I see that it provides various content slots for the different versions instead of there being different content snaps for each version. The way the snap declaration is setup for opera-developer, it allows you to auto-connect with any of the slots provided by the chromium-ffmpeg snap, so there is nothing to be done and everything should just work for you to use chromium-ffmpeg-93464. Please report back if this is not the case for you.
