Why are filetypes for videos so hard on opensuse (and linux in general)?

I got a ton of .flv files, webm’s, mp4’s. I can’t play .flv at all, and that sucks since i recorded all my stuff with it. It’s also similar with kdenlive, good program but when i want to render it only does mpg. Very few sites accept mpg.

There’s another issue with youtube which probably has to do with these. Some videos on youtube whenever you skip ahead, then youtube itself goes “error 696767429”, meaning you cannot skip ahead or backwards at all which is inconvenient. A refresh fixes it usually but still very annoying. How do i fix this?

The basic problem is that some video formats are patented, you have to pay a fee to use them. “Linux in general” is available for free so the default installs generally avoid or plainly cannot include some decoders like commercial systems do since you pay a fee to get a licence.
That includes flash video (.flv). There was once a plugin available from Adobe that allowed playing flash on Linux, but AFAIK it was discontinued for newer kernels as other formats gained popularity on the web.

The YouTube skip problem was explained here. Apparently Vivaldi does a better job than Firefox with those videos, but YMMV.

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Apparently there is still an ffmpeg decoder for flash (check ffmpeg -decoders | grep flv) so you may try ffplay <filename>.flv and see how it goes…

Maybe also gstreamer-plugins-good may help.

rpm -ql gstreamer-plugins-good | grep -i flv
/usr/lib64/gstreamer-1.0/libgstflv.so
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Hey @lopultahiisi, what you are seeing with kdenlive is not expected behavior. kdenlive by itself contains no codecs, it uses the fantastic ffmpeg programs for all decoding and encoding. The version of kdenlive in the openSUSE:oss repo is good, and while the openSUSE ffmpeg packages have some restrictions, that actually should not cause the mpg-only problem you describe.

In particular, AV1, VP8 and VP9, as well as a variety of older codecs like h263 flash video should all work with the OSS ffmpeg and codecs. I’m pretty sure that’s correct but maybe there’s some issue that I’m not aware of.

So to me it sounds like you simply don’t have the codecs installed.

I did some semi-related testing recently and I could setup a preset that encoded to flv without Packman. However I should revisit this when I get a chance and setup an install where I never enable Packman as switching back and forth isn’t ideal.

So kdenlive ships with presets - you can also add your own or download community made presets - and then it calls ffmpeg with the options from the preset to do the encoding. Without Packman, h264 won’t work but other good options should be available. kdenlive is smart enough to highlight presets that are not supported with the configured ffmpeg.

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