09 May 2019

How to play H264 and MP4A Videos with OpenSUSE TUmbleweed

If you want to play mp4-Files with videolanclient vlc under OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, you may get the following error:

Codec not supported:
VLC could not decode the format "mp4a" (MPEG AAC Audio)
Codec not supported:
VLC could not decode the format "h264" (H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10))

There are some Codecs missing. To install them, you can easily use zypper via pacman. Add the Pacman Repo and install the codecs:

# zypper ar -f ftp://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/ packman
# zypper in vlc-codecs

There cann occur some conflicts, which might to be solved in a senseful manner. I think you can manage this. Example:

Problem: ffmpeg-4-4.1.3-5.1.x86_64 requires libavresample4 = 4.1.3-5.1, but this requirement cannot be provided
  not installable providers: libavresample4-4.1.3-5.1.i586[packman]
                   libavresample4-4.1.3-5.1.x86_64[packman]
 Solution 1: install libavresample4-4.1.3-5.1.x86_64 (with vendor change)
  openSUSE  -->  http://packman.links2linux.de
 Solution 2: do not install ffmpeg-4-4.1.3-5.1.x86_64
 Solution 3: break ffmpeg-4-4.1.3-5.1.x86_64 by ignoring some of its dependencies

Choose from above solutions by number or skip, retry or cancel [1/2/3/s/r/c] (c): 1

…