Saturday, 13 January 2024

Non free codecs on tumbleweed

I have been an Ubuntu user in one way or another for as long as I can remember. They ship with all the proprietary codecs you could possibly need. After a recent switch to openSUSE tumbleweed, it took quite a while to get video playback working as expected.

To be fair, I am not the freedom fighter I once was. My primary browser is Chrome, and things like twitch work without any extra codecs. Firefox, on the other hand, was not so straight forward. I need to use this from time for testing, not that twitch has anything to do with my job. I do need to be able to run Windows Media Video and this just did not work, even after installing the trusty VLC player.

After searching the internet for longer than I would like to admit. I finally found the really simple answer the OBS Package Installer (OPI). No not the studio, the openSUSE Build Service.

sudo zypper install opi

From there docs you are able to install lots of different application that are not in the official repos, even there is a lot of packages. The main one I was looking for is codecs, this installs the packman codecs so we can play MP4.

opi codecs

If you have this installed you can also search for other packages to install. It gives you a nice alternative to the flatpack packages that the software store offers. Refer to the docs for more info.