I’ve finally got enough stuff working in leap to want to use it on a regular
basis. So since my brain was tired I decided to kick back and watch a few
previously downloaded youtube videos.
Lately I’ve been downloading them as webm files. But I’ve got quite a few that
were downloaded as mp4 files. I use an easily edited play list file {0-Playlist.pls}
Which I prefer to use with parole.
With Mageia Linux this works for both webm and mp4 files. But I just
discovered that the parole I installed in Leap:
wants MPEG-4-AAC decoder and H.264 decoder to play one of my mp4 files.
I can play them with smplayer. But I {like/am used to} using parole.
After a bit of poking around I found out that these decoders can supposedly be had
from rpmfind as faad2-libs & x264-libs… With which info I found these:
What do I need to do to get mp4 support in Leap’s parole?
I’d ask if there was a packman version but if there was, then parole should have
changed vendor when I did the:
You did what was necessary to use the codecs from Pacman.
Assuming your app knows how to use those codecs, it should work.
Have you rebooted your system?
Maybe run a system update just to be sure everything else is up to date (not just change vendor to Pacman)
zypper up
BTW - the problem isn’t likely the mp4 container format, the problem is that the video is likely encoded with h.264 which is not completely free… It’s free for anyone to encode something for viewing on up to 100 devices but if the video is intended to be seen on more devices, you’re supposed to pay a fee (IIRC something like 15 cents per device).
> You did what was necessary to use the codecs from Pacman.
> Assuming your app knows how to use those codecs, it should work.
Yeah that’s how I thought it was supposed to work.
> Have you rebooted your system?
Many times.
> Maybe run a system update just to be sure everything else is up to date
> (not just change vendor to Pacman)
Since I can’t remember doing that since the vendor change, that might even be the
root of the problem. At least it’s worth a try.
> BTW - the problem isn’t likely the mp4 container format, the problem is
> that the video is likely encoded with h.264 which is not completely
> free… It’s free for anyone to encode something for viewing on up to
> 100 devices but if the video is intended to be seen on more devices,
> you’re supposed to pay a fee (IIRC something like 15 cents per device).
You could be right about that… I just know that when I tried to open that mp4, I
had previously downloaded from youtube, I got separate error pop-ups telling me that
I needed them.
> It would appear that on Jun 18, tsu2 did say:
> > Maybe run a system update just to be sure everything else is up to date
> > (not just change vendor to Pacman)
>
> Since I can’t remember doing that since the vendor change, that might even be the
> root of the problem. At least it’s worth a try.
Nah, didn’t make any difference. So I guess I’ll get used to using smplayer or vlc for
that. Thing is I’m not much of a mouse user {I find it hard to click where I thought
I was pointing} And with parole, when I exit full screen, Not only can I see the
playlist, but the up/down cursor keys and enter is all I need to quickly select a
different video whenever I’m not enjoying the one I’m watching.
I can sort of do that with vlc but:
After I leave full screen I need to use ^L to pull up the list. When it comes up the
focus isn’t on the list itself. And while it’s possible to get there with the tab
key, I find it hard to tell when I’ve hit tab the correct number of times. So I wind
up wrestling with the mouse to “click” on a video title…
But over all I’m still well pleased with Leap. So I guess I’ll just have to get used
to vlc…
apparently parole uses the old gstreamer 0.10
so check you have gstreamer-0_10 and it’s plugins (gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad gstreamer-0_10-plugins-good gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ugly gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ffmpeg) installed from packman and obviously done a full vendor change to packman
> apparently parole uses the old gstreamer 0.10
> so check you have gstreamer-0_10 and it’s plugins
> (gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad gstreamer-0_10-plugins-good
> gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ugly gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ffmpeg) installed
> from packman and obviously done a full vendor change to packman
Sounded good, and I’m just as glad to have the ‘old gstreamer 0,10 plugins’ installed
anyway. But no Joy, at least not unless they’d need some service restarted to start
working. I’ll check again after I get around to rebooting.
Decided to take a look at this, on a TW although I doubt that matters…
It looks like parole has a bug…
It doesn’t know how to find the codecs installed in the system.
Also, when it launches and attempts to play a file it doesn’t have a codec, it will offer to download and install the codec but it appears that the embedded URL to download the codec is broken (intentionally? Might be when parole is distributed as part of Gnome and due to openSUSE policy on proprietary code).