I went to watch movie tonight and had to deal with the codec issues. I did the 1-click method to install all codecs. It also installs flash and many other things as well as you most likely know. Everything worked except for playing avi formatted movies. I followed instructions to get gxime to play them and did. However, the sound was very quiet and I tried to adjust this. Somehow, it now says the “Audio device is unavailable”. When I try to play the same file, or others in VLC it just plays audio. I would like to get VLC to work to play AVIs.
go to YaST > Hardware > Sound > Other > Volume and move the volume bars there (master, PCM, … if there) and move them to the right to about 70% or so
run one’s mixer and move up master volume and PCM to 70% or so. Note in some case when one run’s an app, PCM may move down, and one may have to go back in to the mixer to adjust the PCM.
Reference no video with VLC, typically there can be three causes:
you may have special desktop effects enabled, in which case you need to change the video output module in vlc from “auto” or “xv” (xvideo) to “x11” (as a work around) and/or
you have a mix of videolan and packman packaged applications (codecs and players) which is causing a problem, and it is best (IMHO) to switch to only using Packman to get rid of this problem, and/or
you have a bad video driver (for example some PCs with bad Intel video drivers could have such a problem).
Can you post here the output of copying and pasting the following, one line at a time, in a gnome-terminal / konsole :
g@linux-jkzv:~> rpm -q smplayer MPlayer libxine1 w32codec-all vlc libffmpeg0 libquicktime0
package smplayer is not installed
package MPlayer is not installed
libxine1-1.1.15-0.pm.1
w32codec-all-20071007-0.pm.1
vlc-0.9.1-0.pm.2
libffmpeg0-0.4.9.13782-1.2
package libquicktime0 is not installed
That is the output. And I adjusted vlc to use X11 instead.
You can tell packman packaged applications by the “pm” in the version numbering. You have a mix of Packman packaged applictions (libxine1 and w32codec-all and vlc) and videolan packaged applications (libffmpeg0). The videolan packaged libffmpe0 is in the most part NOT compatible with the Packman packaged apps, and the package libffmpeg0 carries most of the codecs that your openSUSE Linux will use. Hence that is a problem. Hence you must use a different packaged version of libffmpeg0.
Did that help?
Whether it helped or not, I recommend you replace the Videolan packaged libffmpeg0 with the packman packaged libffmpeg0. Do that by going here: Repositories - openSUSE-Community
and select your openSUSE version, and add OSS, NON-OSS, Update and Pacmkan as repositories. Those 4 and ONLY those 4. No others. None. Remove Videolan as an enabled selection. ONLY the 4 that I mentioned.
Then after refreshing go to YaST > Software > Management and replace the Videolan Packaged libffmpeg0 with the Packman packaged libffmpeg0.
If Videolan was compatible with Packman packaged apps (or visa versa) you would not have to do this, however unfortunately they are not compatible and if you want the best multimedia playback, you have no choice.
Also, after replacing your videolan libffmpeg0 with the packman packaged version of libffmpeg0 , I recommend you install “smplayer” and “libquicktime0”.
Alright. SMPlayer plays movies now, which is very nice, the only issue I am having now is when I try to install libquicktime0 it gives me an error saying that I need to manually solve the issue about replacing an older version. I do so but then a blank menu comes up and will not let me chose anything.
If my memory is correct, then typically quicktime does not have many (possibly no) dependencies. Thus removing the older version should not break many apps. Hence make note of the older version, remove the older version, and then install the newer version.
Now if I am wrong about the dependencies of the older version, perhaps post the details of the error message here.
I typically use smart package manager to resolve the dependencies problems that I encounter, so I don’t have the zypper/yast experience here, and I can not pass any specifics re: zypper/yast.