Well, a Tumbleweed Update Has Broken SMPlayer - Again

I’m getting seriously tired of this.

First mpv, the backend for SMPlayer, broke after a Tumbleweed audio/video library and codecs update, so switched the backend to mplayer.

Now today’s updates and reassignment of a lot of files to openSUSE rather than Packman has broken both SMPlayer and mplayer and mpv.

It’s becoming apparent to me that there is absolutely no synchronicity between Packman and openSUSE. Neither one gives a rat’s ass about the other, and in my view openSUSE needs to stop recommending Packman if openSUSE’s updates are just going to break them on every update.

How can I go about removing Packman completely from my system with regard to audio/video libraries and apps?

I also guess that I might as well stick solely to VLC to run videos as SMPlayer is basically deprecated in terms of support by anyone.

I just spent a while trying to clear out Packman packages. Got rid of quite a few, then deleted the repository. We’ll see if any problems develop. Found a view orphaned packages which I didn’t need and uninstalled them.

Switched system packages to openSUSE as far as I can tell, and apparently everything is there including SMPlayer which appears to work again so far. We’ll see if I run into any codec issues.

I should have heeded the warning on the openSUSE third party repository page that says one is almost certainly going to run into problems. Of course, those “problems” are the result of people not wanting proprietary codecs in the system thus necessitating something like Packman in the first place.

OK, so I still can’t play mp4. What I would like to do is install ONLY those codecs from Packman that are absolutely needed to play mp4 videos and then lower Packman’s install level so nothing else gets installed from Packman. But I don’t know which libraries are required? All the codec install tutorials just say “install everything”. Well, I already have everything but the proprietary ones, I just need those and nothing else.

Is this doable?

I give up. Apparently there is no way to use VLC or ANY multimedia player on Tumbleweed without installing Packman.

Ah, wait. There is a VLC Flathub. I installed that after uninstalling the system VLC. Now I can play everything, and I don’t need Packman. Much as I dislike these new installation mechanism - Snap and Flathub - they do come in handy by bundling everything. Also why I like AppImages.

I find that using Flatpaks is a viable option - I have some apps installed as Flatpaks, because if I attempt to use the raw / dedicated openSuse version, they don’t work without time-consuming work.

The other reason is, with some apps, openSuse is behind-the-times. For example, the Opera browser, which is currently at 104 beta … in the openSuse repos, Opera is stuck at a pre-100 version, which is the “old GUI” version … but the Flatpak version is at 103.xx.

I’m also experimenting with openSuse MicroOS Kalpa, whereby all apps are run as Flatpaks.

So one can spend an hour or more trying to fix an issue, or spend a couple minutes to install a Flatpak and be on the road.

@dickhack Hi, or if only wanting to use VLC, their dedicated repository…
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-suse.html
https://download.videolan.org/SuSE/Tumbleweed/

This is not true.
Show openSUSE:Factory:NonFree / opera - openSUSE Build Service is at 102.0.4880.40 with a request to update to version 103.0.4928.16 (newest stable version): Request 1115893: Submit opera - openSUSE Build Service

By the way: openSUSE is a community based distribution. Working together is easy, because we have OBS: https://build.opensuse.org/
Create an account and work together on updates and bugs.
You are welcome!