I’m running latest KDE 4.2 on 11.1, and all multimedia is generally functioning fine. I can play videos / DVDs in Kaffeine (KDE3 version), rip audio CDs in K3B (KDE3), and I have both the GStreamer and Xine backends for Phonon installed. Dragon Player, however, won’t play a single thing I throw at it, simply displaying ‘No media loaded’ in the status bar.
I’ve tried browsing for files within the program, or using the right-click ‘Open with Dragon Player’ option, or dragging files onto it, be they mpg, avi, mp4 or otherwise, some are just videos shot with my digital camera, etc. It just sits there redundant doing nothing. I’ve upgraded the package two or three times to the latest build in the KDE4 factory repo.
Anybody else getting this? I noticed that in the dragonplayerrc config file, each video I’ve attempted to open has an entry reading something like this:
Before anybody wastes their time looking into this, I’ve made some progress, after the best part of an afternoon that could have been spent on something a lot more fun.
I already had the usual libxine1 and assorted Packman codecs installed, and I had checked that everything contained in the 1-click multimedia codec .ymp file was already present on my system, so I systematically went through downloading a whole load more codecs that had ‘mpeg’ or ‘mpg’ somewhere in the name or description. None of the more obvious or familiar ones I installed, like ffmpeg, made any difference, but gradually as I had almost exhausted the list, I started getting some shaky and rather unsatisfactory results.
I then realised I was running on a powersaving mode that throttles the CPU to its lowest setting of 600MHz, so I reset powerdevil to the default performance mode. Following that, most of the digital camera mpg videos now play back in Dragon Player (though not in Kaffeine, even though that more comfortably handles some of the other file types). Dragon Player is far from reliable though. Several of these short videos were filmed at the same location with identical settings, yet some launch properly and others show no picture, with the dragonplayerrc file again marking them as ‘IsVideo=false’, even after deleting it and letting it create a fresh one.
So what I have now is a somewhat unsatisfactory jumble of codecs, some of them probably not required, and a temperamental computer that will only load video files if running with a dynamic CPU, even though it never had problems in the past under KDE3. I’ve gone through the multimedia codec installation several times since the days of SuSE 8/9, and it now seems considerably more complex than it ever was. I’d rather hoped that with the advent of KDE4 and Phonon, things would instead have got easier.
Take a look at the number of MPEG-related decoders / encoders on Packman - there’s dozens. I wish there could just be one that did it all.