Video codecs

[addr]

In 64 bit KDE Kaffeine I can play everything fine (the suggested gstreamer packages when it first opens seemed to do the trick.)

 

However in Gnome I can play most commercial DVD's but not a first jump skydiving video which was probably made on a Windows computer at the dive centre. The introduction is obviously commercial and that plays but the rest doesn't.

 

I have lib64dvdcss2 installed but don't know if the win32-codecs are since I can't find them. As far as I can tell all the gstreamer stuff is installed.

[Kieth]

I just looked in MCC and found it. I searched with the name codec, and found win32-codecs.

 

Version: 1.9-1plf2009.0

Group: System/Libraries

Architecture: i586

Size: 22191 KB

Medium: PLF Non-free2

[tyme]

gstreamer-plugins-ugly, IIRC, contains several of the windows codecs.

[adamw]

The best way to be sure of what you need is to try playing the video with mplayer at a console:

 

mplayer (filename)

 

at the console it will give you (along with a lot of other stuff) detailed information on exactly what audio and video codec are used in the file. That will let us figure out what package you need to install.

[neddie]

I had a problem like this yesterday too. I got an mp4 file which plays in mplayer but without sound. The error message says

Trying to force audio codec driver family libmad...
Requested audio codec family [faad] (afm=faad) not available.
Enable it at compilation.
Cannot find codec for audio format 0x6134706D.
Read DOCS/HTML/en/codecs.html!
Audio: no sound

I also tried vlc, totem and kaffeine with the same result.

 

Even after installing win32-codecs, faad2, libfaad2, faac, libfaac0, ffmpeg, and basically everything else I could find, I still got this error and no sound from mplayer. But then I tried kaffeine again and now it works, including sound. :D

 

Strangely, vlc (which is often more successful at wacky formats) still gives the amazingly helpful error message:

No suitable decoder module:
VLC does not support the audio or video format "mp4a". Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.

And Totem can't play either video or audio.

[Greg2]

neddie, are you using the mplayer and vlc packages from the PLF repos?

[neddie]

Don't think so, just the normal Mdv ones as far as I know:

$ rpm -qa | grep mplayer
mplayer-1.0-1.rc2.10.3mdv2008.1

$ rpm -qa | grep vlc
vlc-plugin-a52-0.9.3-1mdv2008.1
libvlc2-0.9.3-1mdv2008.1
libvlccore0-0.9.3-1mdv2008.1
vlc-plugin-ogg-0.9.3-1mdv2008.1
vlc-0.9.3-1mdv2008.1
vlc-plugin-pulse-0.9.3-1mdv2008.1

[Greg2]

They're from the Mandriva repos, you need the ones from the PLF that are compiled with more audio/video support options.

[adamw]

right - for mplayer, as well as the appropriate libs, you have to install the mplayer from PLF.

[addr]

Well I can't understand it.

 

I have the plf repos enabled and have from the start , neither win-32 codecs nor mplayer are showing. However Kaffeine is so I downloaded that and it plays the video fine so I'm OK.

 

I'd still like to know why I can't find those things...because I am on 64 bit maybe?

 

Thanks for all your help.

 

Viva Kaffeine!

[scarecrow]

Viva Kaffeine!

Caffeine is just a xine frontend, so it is just the way xine-lib is built. And anyway, xine-lib is using the same win32codecs mplayer.hu is providing.

Mplayer from plf should work OK. For some reason it seems that the so-called proprietary formats were disabled at compile time from the regular mplayer build.

[Greg2]

I'd still like to know why I can't find those things...

In your gui software manager in the upper left there are two drop down boxes, change them both to 'all'. Then look again. :)

[neddie]

They're from the Mandriva repos, you need the ones from the PLF that are compiled with more audio/video support options.

Cool, thanks, that fixed it!

 

I had no idea there was another mplayer in plf, I thought that either a package was available from the Mandriva repos or it was only available via plf. And I thought that a lot of mplayer's extra abilities came from the extra packages (codecs) installed on top, I thought it was all so modular that you could add anything to it.

 

Thanks for the tip!

[adamw]

neddie: due to the way mplayer works, it itself has to be expressly built with support for the patent-affected stuff.

 

there are quite a lot of packages with both MDV and PLF versions available; stuff where patent-affected bits can be enabled or disabled at compile time. The version in MDV repos will have it disabled, the version in PLF repos will have it enabled.