Every time I install openSUSE or upgrade the distribution, I lose the ability to play media which use proprietary codecs, namely the h264 or AAC codecs. I generally use GNOME for my desktop environment, but rather than use Totem (or “Videos” now), I usually choose to use an MPlayer derivative, mostly SMPlayer. I’ve found that even if Totem can play videos with h264 content, I have to perform a bit more work to give that same ability to SMPlayer.
Specifically, I have to install packages from the Packman repository to add the capability to play media with these codecs. Unfortunately, at the moment, ffmpeg from Packman doesn’t depend on these packages, so I have to remember to install the version from the Packman repository (since the base repositories also have versions of most of these, and sometimes they have a higher version number) for each of them to gain the full benefit.
Until now, I’ve had to take guesses as to which packages will yield the codec support for which I’m hunting, so I wanted to make a thread for myself and anyone else who encounters similar issues. I have found that the following set of packages provides support for the aforementioned proprietary codecs:
Always use the versions from the Packman repos. Forget the version numbers in Packman compared to those in the openSUSE repos, you want EVERYTHING from the Packman repos. So, in the Yast Software manager, do the Packman repo switch.
Selecting individual packages from the Packman repository does work. That’s the point of this thread. I listed the packages a person needs to select in order to make h264 playback work. I only didn’t answer whether a person could install a subset of those packages and have playback still work.
I created this thread primarily for my own benefit and to help anyone else who may have had this same question, since I couldn’t find a definitive list myself.
packages change and selecting individual packages is not a good idea as a package dependencies might change a full vendor change is the way to be sure all your multimedia is from packman
if the point of this thread was to tell people what to install it should be removed as misleading and bad practice, you should have put it in soapbox