Packman discontinued from Jan 1st 2027, but here's your chance!

tckosvic · September 25, 2026, 1:41am

It appears to me that all the functionality and packages that used to come from packman have been sloughed off to other repos. Why would you put efforts in something that now has no reason to exist?

tom kosvic

Fraser_Bell · September 25, 2026, 2:15am

First, don’t take this personally, I am NOT jumping on you. But, I would like to say I prefer reliable sources for facts.

Might be true, but Google (and other search engine ai implementations) ai is very unreliable. It told me Morgan Freeman played the Dobro in the movie “The Magic of Belle Isle”. He did not. I was trying to find out who did play the Dobro in the soundtrack.

I would prefer to see more reliable attributions.

MODERATORS: If this does come across as offensive, please delete it. That is not my intent

iznogood · September 25, 2026, 7:07am

I know for a fact that firefox is not using gstreamer for decoding, the edit was just to show WHEN it happened.

If you prefer a regular news site from the time:
firefox-43-to-use-ffmpeg-by-default-on-linux

And here is the bug from Mozilla Enable FFMpeg by default

dcurtisfra · September 25, 2026, 9:21am

@akontsevich:
Thank you for once again mentioning the codec checker URL.

I overlooked the previous mentions of this tool …

At last I have a reasonable view of my hardware’s capabilities –

malcolmlewis · September 25, 2026, 11:45pm

@akontsevich @dcurtisfra Have a read here;
https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/discussions/13909

@akontsevich I swapped out the Intel ARC for a Quadro P400 and running the 580.178.04 proprietary driver from the nvidia repository…

inxi -GSaz
System:
  Kernel: 6.12.0-160000.38-default arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc
    v: 13.4.0 clocksource: tsc avail: hpet,acpi_pm
    parameters: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-6.12.0-160000.38-default
    root=UUID=099c2447-2756-44ee-86db-741f0d5ca5bd splash=silent
    mitigations=auto quiet security=selinux intel_iommu=on
    intel_pstate=passive loglevel=2 selinux=1 rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau
  Desktop: GNOME v: 48.4 tk: GTK v: 3.24.50 wm: gnome-shell
    tools: gsd-screensaver-proxy dm: GDM v: 48.0 Distro: openSUSE Leap 16.0
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel Xeon E3-1200 v2/3rd Gen Core processor Graphics vendor: Dell
    driver: i915 v: kernel arch: Gen-7 process: Intel 22nm built: 2012-13 ports:
    active: none empty: DP-1,HDMI-A-1,VGA-1 bus-ID: 00:02.0 chip-ID: 8086:0152
    class-ID: 0380
  Device-2: NVIDIA GP107GL [Quadro P400] vendor: Dell driver: nvidia
    v: 580.178.04 alternate: nouveau,nvidia_drm non-free: 550.xx+ status: current
    (as of 2024-09; EOL~2026-12-xx) arch: Pascal code: GP10x
    process: TSMC 16nm built: 2016-2021 pcie: gen: 1 speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 16
    link-max: gen: 3 speed: 8 GT/s ports: active: DP-2 empty: DP-3,DP-4
    bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 10de:1cb3 class-ID: 0300
  Display: wayland server: Xwayland v: 24.1.6 compositor: gnome-shell
    driver: N/A display-ID: 0
  Monitor-1: DP-2 res: 1920x1080 size: N/A modes: N/A
  API: EGL v: 1.5 hw: drv: intel crocus drv: nvidia platforms: device: 0
    drv: nvidia device: 1 drv: crocus gbm: drv: crocus surfaceless: drv: nvidia
    wayland: drv: nvidia x11: drv: nvidia
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 compat-v: 4.2 vendor: nvidia mesa v: 580.178.04
    glx-v: 1.4 direct-render: yes renderer: Quadro P400/PCIe/SSE2
    memory: 1.95 GiB display-ID: :0.0
  API: Vulkan v: 1.4.309 layers: 3 device: 0 type: discrete-gpu
    name: Quadro P400 driver: N/A device-ID: 10de:1cb3
    surfaces: xcb,xlib,wayland device: 1 type: integrated-gpu name: Intel HD
    Graphics 2500 (IVB GT1) driver: N/A device-ID: 8086:0152
    surfaces: xcb,xlib,wayland

vulkaninfo | grep VK_KHR_video_

	VK_KHR_video_decode_h264                      : extension revision 9
	VK_KHR_video_decode_h265                      : extension revision 8
	VK_KHR_video_decode_queue                     : extension revision 8
	VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9                       : extension revision 1
	VK_KHR_video_encode_h264                      : extension revision 14
	VK_KHR_video_encode_h265                      : extension revision 14
	VK_KHR_video_encode_quantization_map          : extension revision 2
	VK_KHR_video_encode_queue                     : extension revision 12
	VK_KHR_video_maintenance1                     : extension revision 1
	VK_KHR_video_maintenance2                     : extension revision 1
	VK_KHR_video_queue                            : extension revision 8

Fraser_Bell · September 26, 2026, 3:40am

Thank you. Yes, I knew you were correct. I just wanted to stress that answers from ai are unreliable, and can be misleading. Thus I think they should not be used in a technical support forum. And thank you for the reliable link. Keep on supporting us openSUSE users, we appreciate your help.

OrsoBruno · September 26, 2026, 3:13pm

Please be aware that mpv still needs the Packman (or Videolan) ffmpeg to perform its magic. In other words, with a pure OSS install (not even with libopenh264) but with GPUs supporting h264 Vulkan video decoding:

ffplay someh264video.mp4

does not play video, while

gst-play-1.0 someh264video.mp4

does play video as intended.
So you may have better chances with Gstreamer based players.

[Checked on current Leap 16.0, should be the same on Tumbleweed AFAIK]

malcolmlewis · September 26, 2026, 3:57pm

One of the reasons I use both VLC and Handbrake flatpaks If needed, can refine to a suitable format…

I don’t play that many videos, music (via rtl_sdr) is my jam…

dcurtisfra · September 26, 2026, 4:53pm

@OrsoBruno:

Here on Tumbleweed with the VideoLAN ffmpeg-8, –

mpv with the mentioned in GitHub environment variable “RADV_EXPERIMENTAL” set to the value “video_decode”, couldn’t find any codecs on the GPU silicon but, it played mp4 videos anyway;
ffplay also plays mp4 videos but, doesn’t stop automagically at the end of the file;
gst-play-1.0 also plays mp4 videos but, doesn’t auto-rotate them.

ugjka · September 26, 2026, 5:02pm

video lan repo doesnt have the patched mesa

deano_ferrari · October 4, 2026, 9:46pm

A post was split to a new topic: Wine and 32-bit codec support

akontsevich · October 7, 2026, 11:04pm

VLC repository does not have libheif-ffmpeg.

deano_ferrari · October 7, 2026, 11:13pm

No it is supplied by OSS repo.

yuri · October 9, 2026, 5:40pm

As I see the ire is people talk across purposes: Alice says “I want to decode H.264/H.265/4K/8K/whatever on my hardware” which kind of translates to “My hardware is not fully supported without packman”. While Bob usually answers either “There is a software workaround” or “it works on my hardware”. Both are equally annoying for both parties. And it is in like each thread about packman.

To be fair Malcolm gave me satisfactory answer that hardware can’t be supported because of same legal reasons.

Also I tried flatpack’s vlc and it seems to use hardware acceleration on AMD CPU (I got nice 99% CPU idle playing 4K video), so learning how to rebuild Mesa/ffmpeg is not this weekend’s project At least not for x64. (Actually rebuilding RPMs is extremely easy, maybe worth writing an article somewhere about it).

hendersj · October 9, 2026, 11:11pm

Sure, and I understand the ire. It’s just misdirected - it’s directed at openSUSE (or SUSE), rather than those who have decided that they want to profit off of the IP (which often isn’t something they created, but something they acquired) rather than making the format free. Or the content provider, who decided to use a codec that isn’t free.

Which is why it’s important to be educated about what the actual underlying issue is - and what it isn’t.