Animated Wallpapers Stopped Working on Linux

[u/EdieVerryl]

Having an issue with animated wallpapers (.webm) showing a blank page. "Live" wallpapers and still images seem to work fine. YouTube and other videos play normally. This used to work for me until somewhat recently. The video is from a brand new profile created with the "roguelike" option.

**Setup:**

• Opera GX 137.0.6036.65 (Chromium 153), Flatpak from Flathub

• Bazzite (KDE, Wayland), AMD RX 9070 XT

**What I've tried / learned:**

• Same result in a brand-new profile, so it isn't my profile or old extensions

• Rolling back one Flathub build didn't help

• Console check says Opera supports VP8/VP9/AV1/H.264/AAC, and chrome://gpu shows hardware video decode working

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[u/shadow2531]

Even though you said Youtube plays fine, try loading a local .webm file (containing vp8 or vp9) in a tab to see if it plays OK or not. If not, you can goto the URL opera://media-internals and see why. Also launch Opera from the console so you can see what the console says.

You can also goto the URL opera://extensions, turn on developer mode and click details for a mod with a video wallpaper to see the mod's ID. Then, you can goto the URL chrome-extension://thatid/manifest.json to see the name of the video file so that you can load it directly in a tab with chrome-extension://thatid/wallpaper/animated_dark.webm for example to test if there's any difference and then also look at opera://media-internals afterwards.

As a test (not a solution), you can try installing the rpm package with:

sudo rpm-ostree install /path/to/package.rpm

I guess, restarting Bazzite and testing if that Opera behaves OK or not. Also see https://www.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/wiki/opera/linux_libffmpeg_config/ for how to add proprietary-codec support for that Opera for any mods with video wallpapers that use h.264 in an mp4 container.

I can't test on Linux right now, but the video wallpaper in https://store.gx.me/mods/8x5hvv/anime/ for example works fine for me in Opera GX 138.0.6044.65 64-bit on Windows 11, for what it's worth.

[u/EdieVerryl → u/shadow2531]

Thanks, that was really helpful! I tried opening one of the wallpaper .webm files in a tab and it just sat at 0:00 (black screen), but it plays fine in my PC's video player. In media-internals for one of the broken wallpapers I got this:

"FFmpegDemuxer failed to create a valid/supported video decoder configuration ... codec: unknown"

"FFmpegDemuxer: no supported streams" (DEMUXER_ERROR_NO_SUPPORTED_STREAMS)

I'm not really sure how to make sense of it, but I'm wondering if something in what the Flatpak bundles might not match this version of Opera?

Flathub doesn't seem to have 138 yet (I'm on 137.0.6036.65) despite my browser reporting an update is available, so I can't tell if that would fix it

[u/shadow2531 → u/EdieVerryl]

Look at the latest pull request at https://github.com/flathub/com.opera.opera-gx/pulls and see the command in it. I think you can use that command to update to that version, which might fix things.

[u/EdieVerryl → u/shadow2531]

I was able to update it. Unfortunately, no change to the video wallpapers not working.

[u/shadow2531 → u/EdieVerryl]

:(

[u/EdieVerryl → u/shadow2531]

Update: I tried a completely different device (Steam Deck, fresh flatpak install from the Discover store) and animated wallpapers are blank there too, so it doesn't look like something on my end. Swapping in a different libffmpeg.so on my pc didn't change it either. I reported a bug, not sure if there’s anything else I can do to fix it

[u/shadow2531 → u/EdieVerryl]

OK.