Opera some video formats are not playing - ffmpeg.so problem

To fix the video playback error in the Opera browser on Ubuntu distributions we will have to get the ffmpeg.so file from either from the Chrome browser or from the chromium-ffmpeg snap package 

Method 1

First of all, you need to install the chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra package. You can do this using the terminal with the following command:

sudo apt install chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra

Usually, the second step is to create a symlink for the file libffmpeg.so, but since now the Opera browser delivers a file with this name (but not solving the problem), we will back up it and then create a symlink to the new file. File rename:

sudo mv /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera/libffmpeg.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera/libffmpeg.so.bak

Creating a symlink:

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

Method 2

Similar to the above procedure, we are getting a symlink from snap package chromium-ffmpeg.

# Close your browser manually. Following command will ensure no Opera processes are running in the background
killall opera
cd /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera

# Some software automatically loads any .so/.dll file that is present. Not sure for Opera, but just in case
mv libffmpeg.so libffmpeg.so.bak
snap install chromium-ffmpeg

# Please note that chromium-ffmpeg-95241 path might differ. Just pickup one with highest number. 
ln -sf /snap/chromium-ffmpeg/current/chromium-ffmpeg-95241/chromium-ffmpeg/libffmpeg.so libffmpeg.so

For people who have to choose the second method, you can use the following shell script to achieve the same.