First, I want to thank the leap team for a great release. I procrastinated about upgrading from 15.6 for a long time because it was so stable and I had no complaints. Leap 16 has been a flawless experience. The only hiccups during installation/setup were NVIDIA related (shocking right?).
Aside from NVIDIA, the only other thing that’s been a regular problem over the years is Firefox, the lack of certain codecs, and relying on third party repositories like packman (who are they?). While using leap 15.6, I decided I was done with packman.
The first alternative I explored was the Firefox flatpak. This comes with its own problems. One was a font rendering issue that had been around for ~5 years when I tried the flatpak. I spent a substantial amount of energy helping to solve that problem, but in the end I decided I dislike the flatpak approach to packaging. But you might be perfectly happy with this approach.
The next thing I tried was downloading the latest linux build directly from mozilla, and building ffmpeg from source. An AI assistant can write a script in about 10 seconds to download both and build ffmpeg from source (amazing times). The problem was that I constantly ran into two bugs that the most recent version had, which became very annoying. That was disappointing since I thought I had found the holy grail.
Then I turned to chromium. But the reality is that the chromium devs aren’t trying to ship a directly user consumable product. In their own words: “Chromium builds are made available on a best-effort basis, and are built from arbitrary revisions that don’t necessarily map to user-facing Chrome releases.”
Then I remembered someone asking me if I had tried Brave (I had not). I checked their website and was pleased to find they have simple instructions for installing on openSUSE!
Hi and welcome to the Forums, and thanks for offering solutions to fellow users.
For the records, Leap 16.0 had problems with h264 due to an old version of gstreamer (1.26.2) but that problem has been solved recently with the update to gstreamer-1.26.7.
So anybody installing or upgrading to Leap 16.0 right now should have no problem playing h264 videos in Firefox from the standard repos.
If that is not the case, please check that you have installed libopenh264-8from https://codecs.opensuse.org/openh264/openSUSE_Leap_16/ which should be enabled by default, and not the version from repo-oss (16.0)
The problem was discussed here no-h264-support-on-leap-16-0
It has been solved eventually some 20 days ago with the release of gstreamer-plugins-bad-1.26.7-160000.1.1
Cisco, which the openSUSE Project is very thankful for their efforts, agreed to an approach on OpenH264 re-distribution via a Cisco-owned infrastructure to openSUSE users.
Just wondering is there an equivalent plugin that one should have in TW. Just wondering as after all the Codec / Packman Shenanigans last week I have switch my repos from Packman to Opensuse only & all seemed good. Except I realise I have a similar issue to the one discussed here in so far as a basic m-peg4 video recorded with a phone will play in Chrome & VLC but not in Firefox where I just get an error. So I assume I’m missing some plug in? Did the latest DUP today so I’m all up to date.
I think I had an Open h265 repo in there before but that seems to have disappeared - maybe due to switching vendors to Opensuse perhaps? Any advice gratefully received.
On doing a bit of digging around I think it is to do with HEVC videos from a phone. So despite people saying you don’t need Packman these days - is it the case that you do need some codecs from Packman for these type of videos to work in Firefox or just use Chrome based browser as per the “solution” offered in this post?
This thread is about h264 and a libopenh264-8 that is offered by Cisco.
There is no “libopenh265” since h265 (AKA HEVC) is still patent encumbered.
You still need Packman (or other third party repos) to decode h265/HEVC and .heic images from Apple phones, just speaking of formats in common use.
Please be aware that so called .mp4 files may include a video stream encoded in a number of formats.
Thank you for taking the time to reply & explain that. Mine is actually an Android phone & on the video settings I have H.264 High compatibility set as opposed to H.265 High Performance. Appears as an Mpeg4 file when downloaded. Doesn’t play when trying to view through Google photos on Firefox but does on Chrome based browser.
On checking I seem to have the libopenh264-8 installed or some kind of dummy version at least but not the 32bit one, which I assume I wouldn’t need with it being a 64bit machine.
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So maybe not HEVC file as I suggested perhaps - just Firefox inadequacies in handling video perhaps. It plays videos on news Website fine. Guess it could also be Google Photos playing up trying to force you to use Chrome too!
While I only mentioned H.264, the solutions also address other codecs including HEVC. I’m not sure about the flatpak, but it will take you three minutes to find out. If you build ffmpeg from source you can enable aac,aac_latm,mp3,h264,hevc,vp8,vp9,av1. I haven’t run into any videos I can’t play on Brave (open-source and Chromium based, not Chrome based).