I did all those things, and I even bought the package from Fluendo and installed that. It was a pain, and now I have several multimedia players some of which work and some which doesn’t. The Gnome (I installed Gnome too) Video works even under KDE, but it has very few functions. The rest, Mplayer, SM player, plus Gplayer and VLC which installed themselves works poorly, if at all.
I have used Open SUSE from before it was SUSE, and I remember until just a few releases ago you could throw almost any multimedia format at it, and it was played. I know the reason for overpriced patented software - greed - and I don’'t like it, but I do accept the people developing SW should be paid for it. This I did with the Fluendo package, which was a limited success. After fighting this I downloaded 13.2 as that at least worked, and if I have to reinstall that wil be the version. Under no circumstance will I go back to Windows, which I haven’t used privately for almost 10 years now.
Many people see open, free, SW as in free beer, but I see it as free speech. When you download SUSE why not make it an option to pay for restricted SW? Of course it is possible to circumvent it if downloading to a DVD which can be installed on many PC’s, but it would be perfectly safe for the developers to allow it on a net-installation. Then it would be possible to install a fully working edition, without all the hassle afterwards.
wrt multimedia codecs (your topic) to address this I highly recommend you add the packman packager repository to your list of repositories. Then in YaST under software management under the Packman repository “switch system packages” to the versions that packman repository (its a one mouse click once in the correct menu).
Note Packman is the only additional repository I recommend. Keeping repositories to a minimum speeds up the updates and avoids problems wrt conflicts between builds in different repositories (for example Packman and VLC repositories often do not work well together). Plus the Quality Assurance (QA) on 3rd party repositories may not be the best.
I do not really understand what you say. As oldcpu explains above, it is very easy to add full multimedia support to your openSUSE. It is like that already many, many versions of openSUSE. It is published in many “sticky” threads in the Multimedia forum here. When you look in te Multimedia forum of these openSUSE forums, you will find a lot of threads where people have problems because, for some reason, they missed doing those simple actions: 1) adding the Packman repo, 2) doing the Vendor switch. All of them report success. Thus you, saying you are using openSUSE for years already, should know this and you will have done this for every new openSUSE version you installed.
And for the reasons why openSUSE does not include this support in the distribution itself, they again are explained on those sticky threads, etc. We, your fellow users, can not change much there, have to live with it and do so without regarding it as a “hassle afterwards” because it is easy to do.
Nice to hear, at last, that someone has reported their experiences with a product I’m (still) going to purchase and install on a Leap 42.2 Laptop.
I prefer the KDE application Kaffeine which, given the Packman version and the Packman codecs, does everything that I need, except for the issues around the payment of fees due for the licensing of MPEG codecs.
Yes, and no. Depends on the company but, patents are often viewed as being a means to protect products which have implemented a new idea in the initial phases of marketing and selling the newest versions of those products.
If the product is basically unusable, unreliable, non-conformant to legal requirements and/or standards, and something that no one wants to purchase anyway, then no amount of “patent protection” is going to help the revenues of that thing.
In terms of DVD and Media support, since MS Windows 8.x, the Redmond folks have stopped shipping an integrated Media-Player. If you buy a current typical OEM (Windows pre-installed) system [except one with Windows 7 pre-installed], you will notice that the Media-Player is something which the OEM bundled with the product.
Are you suggesting that, there should be a subscription (or possibly a donation) service to pay for the licensing of MPEG codecs?
I downloaded the trial version of the Fluendo “ONEPLAY Player” suitable for 64-bit openSUSE – a tar file containing two X86_64 RPM files and a plain text README file.
I read the ReadMe from within Ark and noticed that the CodeMeter RPM has to be installed before the ONEPLAY RPM.
With Dolphin, right-clicked on the tar file and chose “unpack here”.
With Dolphin, right-clicked on the CodeMeter RPM and chose to install it.
With Dolphin, right-clicked on the ONEPLAY trial RPM and chose to install it.
Started the newly installed application in the normal way via the KDE starter, pointed it to the DVD drive where a film DVD was located and, it worked.
[HR][/HR]Minor annoyance:
Leap 42.2 KDE wants to use the Dragon Player by default to view DVD films – the KDE Device Action needs to be set-up to use the Fluendo ONEPLAY instead.
[HR][/HR]My choice:
The Fluendo ONEPLAY DVD Player.
Why? –>> I prefer to use Amarok to play music.
[HR][/HR]Summary:
The Fluendo RPMs installed normally and faultlessly and, no further system actions were required.
Each KDE user needs to change the default Device Action to point to the ONEPLAY application instead of the openSUSE KDE default application – I have no idea if Fluendo has a script to perform this task.
So if you like hassle free just get an older iso of Mint and you are good to go after that just to distro-updates and you shouldn’t have to install multimedia support ever again.
openSUSE delivers, by default, the Fluendo fully licensed MP3 codecs.
This means that, openSUSE will, by default, play Audio-CDs and MP3 streams “out-of-the-box”.
The issues around MPEG 2 and legal CSS keys are not trivial, and therefore the Fluendo ONEPLAY DVD Player is an affordable (at most about 3 or 4 beers) solution to the legal turmoil.
[HR][/HR]If you have a newer Redmond Windows version, (8.0 / 8.1 / 10), which is not an OEM version on the hardware box then, you’ll have to purchase a multimedia player anyway.
After some updates yesterday, my packman vlc ceased to play any vids. Some digging inspired by what I read here revealed it used libavcodec56, which I got from the official suse repos, whereas everything else came from packman. I i changed vendor on that one packet and voila…
I guess the update switched from libavcodec52 (which I got from packman) to 56 (which I got from suse). Thats why the updates seemed to break my vlc. packman repo priority was 99, not 20 as suggested. Anyway, fixed.
after that just to distro-updates and you shouldn’t have to install multimedia support ever again.