opensuse 11.3 X86_64 openoffice impress 3.2.1.4 - pps no sound

I had a opensuse 11.1 X86_64 system with openoffice. This has been replaced by an opensuse 11.3 X86_64 system with openoffice 3.2.1.4. I have many pps files and these worked complete with sound on the 11.1 system but there is no sound on the 11.3 system. The 11.1 system has gone and was overwritten by Windows 7 so I can’t verify the build. I know I made lots of changes to the 11.1 system in order to fix various problems and openoffice could well have come from a factory repo.

What I need to know is what is needed to make impress play pps presentations as it did on 11.1 and does on windows 7. I searched on the internet and it appears that the novell version of ooo may use gstreamer. I have loaded many gstreamer packages from packman including plugin-good but still get no sound. Starting impress from a command line does not produce any error messages.

Does the novell openoffice use gstreamer or java multimedia? I have not yet tried the java option

I could try downloading the novell openoffice source and try to work out what it is using. I am not sure that I have the time to go searching through the source and probably trying to compare it to the ooo source

I would like to suggest you download and activate my bash script file called mmcheck shown in message #40 at the following link:

MMCHECK - Check Your Multimedia in 10 Steps - Script File, as proposed by RedDwarf

If you have sound problems in general, perhaps a more basic approach is needed which you can get from my start script located here:

S.T.A.R.T. - SuSE Terminal Audio Reporting Tool

It is helpful to use the scripts and post the outputs of the tests. Each test actually provides the terminal command, that you can reproduce manually if you wish to. You need to determine if you have a hardware problem or more likely a software problem. It is useful to open up your mixer application, add all of the channels, then make sure than none of the required ones are muted or turned to zero. This final issue happens all of the time and needs to be checked as well.

Thank You,

Over a year ago, I was able to get Microsoft Power Point Viewer to work under wine, so that is an option to do a quality check.

My experience with Linux and Power Point presentations with audio, is 80% of them will work with Open Office Impress, but 20% will not play audio. This 20% is a major irritation to my mother, who is now on Linux full time, and she works around that 20% by having WinXP (with Power Point Viewer) running in Virtual Box under her Linux. Its NOT an ideal solution.

Thank you for your reply. I had however seen your comment on another thread. I can put the pps on the samba file system and wander down to the windows 7 system or boot my laptop into XP and view the pps using the free openOffice. I do not use wine. If wine were to work really well it would be really bad for linux. Why bother to produce a linux native application when you could produce a windows which will run under linux with windows emulation. I wonder how well openoffice runs in wine? it may even play the pps files.

I have lots of pps files with sound that all played, with no problems on my 11.1 system and now non play on my 11.3 system, even having gone through mmcheck and even rebooting the system.

I do not believe that things should be this difficult. I know that there are various problems with restricted multimedia formats but multimedia applications are now required by most individuals and businesses. If it can’t be made to work more easily than this then linux as a desktop environment is dead. It may be that free software and multimedia are mutually exclusive. Multimedia will win. An alternative to wine and virtual box is a linux server based NAS and windows 7 clients although I still have to work out how to backup windows 7 and get multiple desktops working.

Thanks for your reply,

My sound seemed to be more or less working ok. I could play MP3, flash and mpeg4. I have run mmcheck and fixed various things I can now run quicktime video in firefox. The only difference is that I have both openjdk and IBM java jdk 1.6 installed. IBM java is set as the default by alternatives. I have tried both openjdk and ibm java with openoffice and it produces the same result, no sound.

I still get no sound from impress. I am assuming that opensuse ooo is using gstreamer not JMF which I believe was the ooo default (not opensuse) until about the middle of 2010.

I shall have to break into a pps and try to extract the audio.

I really find this annoying that this was working in 11.1 but I can’t get it to work in 11.3

I did not run start as I get sound from lots of applications.

Thanks

I don’t know how to say this without risking you being upset at me, but in truth, it is not that difficult.

I can play more multimedia on my openSUSE than all my friends, the majority ( >90%) of which use MS-Windows. The only exception is power point, where I need to resort to things like Virtual Box or wine with powerpoint viewer (or crossover office with power point viewer) in order to play 100% of the files.

If multimedia fail for you in cases other than power point, it is likely due to something you are doing different from myself, as outside of power point it all works for me, and its not diffcult.

I recommend you start a new thread for the other files (other than power point) that don’t work for you.

Even my wife, who is a BIG MS-Windows fan, concedes that after my setting up the Multimedia on the Linux boot partition of her PC (which was easy for me to do) plays better for her in the Linux boot partition than Multimedia in MS-Windows boot partition.

I am not upset at you. I had got the multimedia that I regularly use running prior to discovering the problem with the pps files. I agree that things are not generally difficult if you know how to do them. I had found various guides to multimedia and also remembered some of the things I had done on 11.1. I had not found mmcheck. mmcheck seems to add a few more things. My point is that spending several hours hunting arround the internet then replacing standard 11.3 components that do not support the multimedia formats and then adding additional components is not easy. It is not difficult if you know exactly what you are doing but that does not make it easy or quick. Going to software management and selecting something that installed all multimedia would be easy. Perhaps if it really was easy your wife would have set up the multimedia. I hope I am not offending you. I think that we have slightly different definitions of easy. While I can spend hours working on a database, writing code, etc. I have little interest in trying to work out which combinations of packages are required and from where they should be obtainded if I wish to get an almost mandatory function working. Having spent over 30 years working in IT, mainframe, unix and pc, installing rpm packages is not difficult. For others I suspect that it is considerably more difficult and they will end up posting something on this forum and then be shot down in flames for having forced something, deleted something or installed something from a dev repo.

My old 11.1 system played all the multimedia that I wanted. My 11.3 system is still quite new and there is a lot that is still to be tested or used for the first time

Even after I have probably installed all the multimedia support that there is the, pps files that worked on my 11.1 system still do not work on my 11.3 system. I shall continue to investigate but I think that it will be a background task.

Thanks, no offence intended.

Shot down in flames ? I hope not.

Given advice, I hope so.

Will they follow the advice? In many cases yes. But also in some cases, no. They figure they already know it all.

We have a number of stickies (1)](http://forums.opensuse.org/english/information-new-users/new-user-how-faq-read-only/440870-new-users-suse-11-3-pre-installation-please-read.html) (2)](http://forums.opensuse.org/english/information-new-users/new-user-how-faq-read-only/424611-new-users-opensuse-pre-install-general-please-read.html) (3)](http://forums.opensuse.org/english/information-new-users/new-user-how-faq-read-only/407184-multi-media-restricted-format-installation-guide.html) (4)](http://forums.opensuse.org/english/information-new-users/advanced-how-faq-read-only/429157-opensuse-software-installation-hints.html) providing advice for new users, and if new users would skim the stickies and follow the stickie advice in areas of interest they would find setting up multimedia very easy and quick.

A forum having ‘stickies’ is common, practically EVERY forum on the web has stickies. However many Linux users appear to be a breed apart and many think they know so much they don’t need to read a stickie. Possibly its their superb expertise coming from an MS-Windows background that gives them that confidence. Possibly its their massive career with work experience in other operating systems. Possibly its just their general view point toward computers. Honestly? I don’t know what it is. But they refuse to read stickies, they figure they already know it all, and even though practically EVERY forum on the web has stickies to read and save trouble they won’t read a stickie. Ergo ? Ergo, they have problems.

Back to power point , I have not had the problem you noted between 11.1 and 11.3 . On my PCs, both successfully played audio in the same power point files. And would NOT play in about 10% of the files. >:( There was no difference for me in behaviour (good and bad) no matter what openSUSE version I used. OpenOffice Impress had the same behaviour. Ergo, I’ve concluded its an open office hiccup. Some power point presentations are built using different audio formats (I assume) that causes openOffice Impress problems. Unfortunately those power point presentations (everyone I have encountered) are also locked so that one can not examine the codec of the audio causing the problem.

Perhaps. She also asked me to set up the multimedia in her winXP, but I could not. I don’t know how. The first few times I tried to install codec packages they broke a number of apps that were useful. Made a royal mess of MS-Windows. I refuse to be dragged in to this now. My wife also will NOT install codecs on an MS-Windows PC. Last time she searched for codec packages, she ended up hitting sites with insulting (almost pornographic) advertisements on the side, when all she wanted was good codecs that did NOT conflict with other windows codecs. My wife also refuses to setup MS-Windows for codecs as well.

Her multimedia in MS-Windows does not work well. The advice of most purported windows knowledgeable friends (when applied) was an unmitigated disaster for some apps.

My wife prefers to use openSUSE Linux for multimedia which does work for her. For everything else she uses WinXP. She is a BIG winXP fan.

I have the openSUSE Linux codecs setup within 5 minutes of a basic openSUSE install (where internet access is available). Its that fast. Of course you are correct. One must know the method and know how. Put me on Ubuntu or Fedora, and it would take me longer (than openSUSE), NOT because it is more difficult in those distro’s (its probably just as fast) but it would take longer because I do not know the method they use. … Fortunately, like openSUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu have guides one can read so one does not need to take hours (but it does take more than 5 minute as I am not that fast a reader). And I do read the guides/stickies to save myself time.

In general multimedia worked well on 11.1 and seems to work well on 11.3 with one notable exception.

I was thinking that it might be openoffice for Linux. It could be the Novell incarnation or the base openoffice. Ooo managed to break openoffice font management that had been working for many years.

With regard to forum posts, sticky or otherwise, I like to be careful. Some will apply to old versions and some are just dangerous. I like to take my time, do some investigation and backup my system before I do anything. I read things and investigate things before I upgrade. However there are hundreds of packages and you can’t investigate them all. If I do, I am likely to end up at the project site. If that product is installed by openSUSE then I would expect to work as described on the project site unless there are big warnings in something like the release notes. The 11.3 release notes make no mention of multimedia or for that matter the apache has been modified, the associated documentation provided is incorrect, the apache.org documentation nolonger works with the openSUSE version and unless you root around in the file system you will never get it to work.

I still think It would be good if the installation was much easier. It would be really good if it was much easier than Windows

Thanks

K-lite codec pack works superb for me under any Windows OS I have tried. It also has got a great tool for resolving codec conflicts installs all the codecs You might need (except those for playing .rmvb as far as I know) and is free for download from Free-Codecs.com : Download K-Lite Codec Pack 6.6.6 FULL, K-Lite Codec Pack 6.6.6 STANDARD, K-Lite Codec Pack 6.6.6 BASIC : K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs and related tools

Best regards,
Greg

I have unlocked the pps & extracted the sound. It is a wav file that plays without problem. I can even get it to play from within impress. It looks as if the problem is that the pps & probably the ppt import does not work correctly. It does not seem to correctly import the slide transitions. If I take a ppt version of the pps (renamed file), correct the transitions and point it at the saved wav file the I get the working presentation. It would appear that the problem is nothing to do with sound and codecs but the openoffice pps/ppt import. Openoffice on windows 7 successfully runs these files. I find this strange as I would expect this to be common code and OS independent. Also these files used to run on my old 11.1 system with and older version of openoffice. This might have been a factory build rather than the standard 11.1 version of openoffice. I have searched the openoffice.org forum and can’t find any recent reference to this feature not working. I therefore suspect that this is an opensuse problem as I believe that the openOffice in openSuse is a modified version.

Thanks to the multimedia people for their assistance. Are there any openOffice experts around?

A correction to this. My post was in error, as I can no longer get sound in pps to work on 11.3, indeed if I ever did. I recall testing 2 PPS on my mother’s 64-bit openSUSE-11.3 KDE4 in Canada, and I do recall one of the 2 played sound (and the other did not), but I can not reproduce that here on an 11.3 PC in Europe (as neither pps I tested in Canada plays sound on my 11.3 pc) so I am doubting my memory. … anyway, at the momement 11.3 does not play sound in pps for me.