I downloaded VLC last night only to discover along with Dragon player, will not play avi’s or mp4’s? (h264 and mp4a - no suitable decoder error messages!) I have 7 partitions, with various versions of linux running, and have installed from netrunner, archbang, crunchbang, ArtistX, Soldydk, Sabayon, Gentoo, Manjaro, ( LinuxBBQ & many of its flavours, ponymuncher,etc etc), amounting to well over 60 different versions on cd & DVD. Yet I was disappointed that a great system like open-Suse lost itself, in the arena of entertainment. You got the Libre-Word Thesaurus included into itself, perfect like Gentoo and who also incidently, personalised it by having their icon included in the Libre splash-screen like yourselves. Majority of other versions of linux dont have the Thesaurus. I mean Hello???, whats a wordprocessor without a thesaurus? The flip side is that the majority of linux brands, apart from suse, are successful in incorporating all sound codecs so that VLC plays like a bomb and thats a great plus for me. Is there any way I can fix this simply or by what other clear step-by-step methods I must pursue? My system is up-to-date. Many Thanks and please keep up the good work! Its sunny and 26.1c or 71 F indoors in Cape Town today.
Add the Packman repo and install “vlc-codecs”.
You can find it e.g. in YaST->Software Repositories->Add->Community Repositories.
You could also add VLC’s own repo (see their homepage) and install it from there, but in that case you should not use Packman (which also contains a lot more multimedia-related stuff, and has the exact same VLC packages)
For Dragon Player, it depends which phonon-backend you use. If it’s phonon-backend-vlc, it should also be able to play MP4s afterwards. But as 13.2 comes with VLC 2.1.5, the included phonon-backend-vlc will not work with the current VLC 2.2.0. You’d need to install it from Packman as well (use the “Versions” tab in YaST->Software Management to choose from which repo it comes). Another reason to prefer Packman over the VideoLAN repo…
For phonon-backend-gstreamer, you should install the appropriate gstreamer-plugins, also available from Packman.
In particular: gstreamer-plugins-bad-orig-addon, gstreamer-plugins-ugly-orig-addon, and gstreamer-plugins-libav
If you get conflicts, always choose “install xxx with vendor change openSUSE → Packman” or similar.
Actually I would recommend to do a full switch to the Packman repo as explained here:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Vendor_change_update#Full_repository_Vendor_change
The codecs cannot be included in the distribution unfortunately because of legal reasons.
[QUOTE=wolfi323;2701293]Add the Packman repo and install “vlc-codecs”.
You can find it e.g. in YaST->Software Repositories->Add->Community Repositories.
You could also add VLC’s own repo (see their homepage) and install it from there, but in that case you should not use Packman (which also contains a lot more multimedia-related stuff, and has the exact same VLC packages)
For Dragon Player, it depends which phonon-backend you use. If it’s phonon-backend-vlc, it should also be able to play MP4s afterwards. But as 13.2 comes with VLC 2.1.5, the included phonon-backend-vlc will not work with the current VLC 2.2.0. You’d need to install it from Packman as well (use the “Versions” tab in YaST->Software Management to choose from which repo it comes). Another reason to prefer Packman over the VideoLAN repo…
For phonon-backend-gstreamer, you should install the appropriate gstreamer-plugins, also available from Packman.
In particular: gstreamer-plugins-bad-orig-addon, gstreamer-plugins-ugly-orig-addon, and gstreamer-plugins-libav
If you get conflicts, always choose “install xxx with vendor change openSUSE → Packman” or similar.
Actually I would recommend to do a full switch to the Packman repo as explained here:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Vendor_change_update#Full_repository_Vendor_change
The codecs cannot be included in the distribution unfortunately because of legal reasons.
[/Thank You so for your experienced insight and assistance, have taken your recommendations and implemented them. I decided to move to the community repository. I reinstalled VLC, have sound, but now hilariously, I have no picture?? I guess my choice is to stick with QMPlayer2 as the sound comes thru alot louder than Mplayer, Noatun or even Dragon. QMplayer2 is very good, but unfortunately doesn’t have the “sharp picture adjuster” like VLC. I hope those highly respected programming geeks out there, can in some way include it in their next update? And to you above all, a praise of gratitude for your kindness and instant response.QUOTE]
Well, there seems to be a problem with hardware decoding at the moment on certain hardware/software combinations.
If you have libvdpau_va_gl1, try to uninstall it.
And/or try switching the video output device in VLC’s settings.
See also: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/505803-VLC-no-longer-plays-MP4-(H264)
I had a similar problem mp4’s would play (in multiple media players) avi’s would not, the solution was setting packman’s repo as the systm repo, I think there are a few OSS multimedia packages installed by default and just adding the packman repository is not sufficient, you could try and do a zypper dup packman, but setting packman as the system repo in yast is a better fix.
[QUOTE=wolfi323;2701330]Well, there seems to be a problem with hardware decoding at the moment on certain hardware/software combinations.
If you have libvdpau_va_gl1, try to uninstall it.
And/or try switching the video output device in VLC’s settings.
See also: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/505803-VLC-no-longer-plays-MP4-(H264)[/Greetings Wolfi323, Your link - See also:https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/505803-VLC-no-longer-plays-MP4-(H264) worked like a charm solving the blank screen. VLC sound & Video output in now working 100% perfectly and in sync. I duplicated the same remedy procedure in the above link, by changing Video-Output from ‘Automatic’ to “XVideo output (XCB)”, and under tab Input/Codecs - Hardware-accelerated Decoding, I chose “VA-API video decoder via X11”. To I_A, thanks for your input advice, extra solutions is always helpful. However, the above link was enough to solve the blank screen issue for me, but your important solution could be a very helful alternative for others reading this message. Once again, I very warm praise of gratitude and thumbs up, for spot-on advice. To all readers, dont give up on Suse, it really is a professional secure engine - and as you can read, a marvelous team of support, thats made me very proud to sport it on my Acer Aspire E15 E5-571-334K, 4GB DDR3 and 500GB. To those Conky tweaking enthusiasts, mine works fine under suse-KDE, Wifi is sharp, Wordprocessor comes complete with thesaurus and nifty suse-logo splashscreen,(I love it), VLC and alternative QMplay2 work just great. From Cape Town, Greenpoint, South Africa, may all you readers out there, have many years of good fun-filled learning experiences with openSUSE.]