Fairly a long time that I watched a DVD again. I noticed that the DVD navigation is not working with kaffeine - I cant move to a different language or Scene. On a normal DVD player it works. Known Bug or new feature?
You mean https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373814 ?
It’s basically caused by limitations in libvlc…
As a workaround, use a different player, e.g. VLC or Xine.
Or you can also get the old KDE4 and Xine-based kaffeine 1.2 from KDE:Extra (named “kaffeine4”):
https://software.opensuse.org/package/kaffeine4
(it will replace kaffeine 2.0.x though, and you should install libxine2-codecs from Packman)
Hi Wolfgang,
yes, looks like this is the one…already some time old, and it seems there is no final solution yet.
As a workaround, use a different player, e.g. VLC or Xine.
Or you can also get the old KDE4 and Xine-based kaffeine 1.2 from KDE:Extra (named “kaffeine4”):
https://software.opensuse.org/package/kaffeine4
(it will replace kaffeine 2.0.x though, and you should install libxine2-codecs from Packman)
The old kaffeine 1.x had some limitations as well, so vlc is probably the program to try. Dragonplayer, installed by default, is not working either…
Thanks!
Yes, because it needs new features in VLC’s libvlc, and there hasn’t been a new release (3.0) yet.
The old kaffeine 1.x had some limitations as well, so vlc is probably the program to try.
Hm, I don’t know what “limitations” you mean exactly, it does work fine here (including DVD menus).
But yes, VLC is probably the most used and feature complete media player nowadays (and most actively developed 
).
As its GUI uses Qt, it’s also quite “integrated” in Plasma.
For DVB (digital TV) I do prefer kaffeine though (either 1.2 or 2.0), because of its channel management.
Of course VLC does show TV streams fine too (and even has videotext support, unlike kaffeine), but you need to enter the frequency and other parameters manually…
Dragon player is just a (simple) frontend to KDE’s Phonon framework, and is therefore also limited by the Phonon backend’s capabilities.
The phonon-backend-vlc probably suffers from the same problem as kaffeine, no idea why DVD menus don’t work with the default phonon-backend-gstreamer though (GNOME’s totem, which uses gstreamer as well, does fine here).
probobly not related but I had an issue with dragon and dvd’s it turned out that gstreamer was trying to use va-api acceleration and my nvidia had no va-api support
it could be something with hardware acceleration I don’t think you can change those options is kaffeine, the video size bug has made kaffeine unusable for me (you can’t set the window size relative to the input video) as stated before kaffeine4 1.2.2 is available for TW from the KDE:Extra repo
So maybe we should drop dragonplayer and kaffeine in favor of vlc to the upcoming Leap 15?
Having openSUSE shipped with an non-working player is quite annoying, esp. for newbies…
Just because they have problems currently with DVD menus?
I’m strictly against dropping them.
Both work fine (here) otherwise, and both are actively maintained upstream.
And as indicated, kaffeine actually has the best DVB support of all players.
Also, we don’t install kaffeine by default since Leap 42.1 anyway. (actually we wanted to use VLC by default, but that had an incompatibility with the Qt5 in Leap at the time (got fixed by an update after the release), so we switched to dragonplayer back then.
Regarding the video size “problem” I_A mentioned: there have been improvements in this regard in the latest versions, but if something doesn’t work as you expect, please file a bug report upstream at bugs.kde.org.
And no, kaffeine does not use VA-API by default.
Actually it’s just a different frontend to VLC, and that uses VDPAU by default.
Your problem may probably have been that you had the package libvdpau_va_gl1 installed which redirects VDPAU to VA-API.
That’s unrelated to Kaffeine (or gstreamer) though and would affect other players (that support/use VDPAU) as well.
Without that package installed, gstreamer should not rely on VA-API either, if it does it would be a bug that should get fixed. (or maybe already is meanwhile)
And yes, you can set all options that VLC supports in Kaffeine too. Have a look at the included README file (in /usr/share/doc/packages/kaffeine/), that also includes a section for how to troubleshoot video problems.
But the problems with DVD menus are definitely unrelated to video hardware acceleration.
A small update: The next Kaffeine version will at least allow to navigate DVD menus via the keyboard (cursor keys, Enter) as a workaround.
The changes that would be necessary to make mouse navigation work have apparently been rejected by the VLC developers (or at least not accepted yet)…
https://cgit.kde.org/kaffeine.git/commit/?id=273edb5120fa8ba5390c39fecb6915e5dc378308