IBBoard2d ago

Tried to upgrade #openSUSE #Tumbleweed. Got some weird errors because #Packman has some syncing issues or something.

Read a post that said "You don't need Packman anyway these days! Just use distro libraries unless you're doing something unusual"

Switched packages back. Tried playing a video. "Nope - no h264 support".

Awesome. So "watching a video" is considered "unusual" by some people 🙄

(Yes, it's a patent-encumbered codec, but if even DECODING the average video that you get DRM-free from GOG is "unusual" then you're only doing very boring stuff on your machine!)

Show threadIBBoard2d ago
I did suspect that this might happen. But it's still a "ugh, dumb advice on the forum that ignores important details" situation.
Show threadIBBoard1d ago

Well, this is fun.

I've got the `repo-openh264` repo configured (codecs.opensuse.org) and it has a `gstreamer-plugin-openh264` package available. But it's only v1.22 and GStreamer is at 1.28 in #openSUSE #Tumbleweed now. And if I install it then one of the conflicts indicates that it's now bundled in `gstreamer-plugins-bad` (and I can see a SO file in the list)

That repo has the `mozilla-openh264` package as well.

There's a different version of of libopenh264 with a version string that includes `noopenh264`, but it's from repo-oss.

If I run `ffmpeg -codecs | grep 264` then I get a line ` ..V.LS h264 H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10`, so it knows SOMETHING about the codec.

But even after switching packages, ffplay still gives "No decoder could be found for codec h264" and Videos gives "requires a H.264 (Baseline Profile) decoder plugin, which is not installed" 😐

And I can't just uninstall and reinstall the whole of GStreamer because that rips out loads of other packages with it (and ignoring the dependencies defeats the idea of "try to clean it up")

Show threadIBBoard1d ago

Okay, so the `noopenh264` package is, as expected, a placeholder for licensing and build purposes. So that won't work.

There is a wiki page. That extra repo is necessary. So it _should_ be working. But it isn't. Awesome 😐

https://en.opensuse.org/OpenH264#Installation

Show threadIBBoard1d ago

Still poking this.

`gst-inspect-1.0` lists "libav: avdec_h264: libav H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10 decoder" and "openh264: openh264dec: OpenH264 video decoder" amongst other plugins. So _it_ can see something.

But `gst-play-1.0` reports a missing plugin and then PackageKit says "Did not install codec: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name is not activatable"

Show threadIBBoard1d ago

Found someone suggesting that it could be libav. But I've got gstreamer-plugins-libav, which is pulling in libavcodec62.

And if I re-enable Packman and install their bad/ugly-codecs then it STILL doesn't work. I'm missing something and I can't see what.

Balls and bugger it. Time for a rollback. Thank goodness for Snapper! #openSUSE #Tumbleweed #Btrfs

Show threadIBBoard

Awesome. My video may have been broken for a while. I've rolled back and I'm getting green videos 😬 So it's _trying_ to play them. But failing somewhere.

Edit: Rolled back further. It's not the NVidia update that broke it either. It was something before that. And it's all videos in Totem.

But ffplay is working. And gst-play-1.0 is working. It's just Totem. Wonderful. I wonder what it is doing differently.

Mar 21 at 11:49amWeb
Show threadIBBoard1d ago

Posting on the forums in case anyone can help.

https://forums.opensuse.org/t/h-264-videos-not-working-without-packman/192697

Green videos is apparently a VA-API problem. So maybe something not playing nicely with NVidia drivers. But uninstalling gstreamer-plugins-vaapi didn't immediately help (and I think it would revert back to software rendering anyway, if I understand correctly)

H.264 videos not working without Packman?

I tried to do a “dup” in Myrlyn last night, and got a load of errors because it was trying to pull in an ffmpeg package from Packman that’s only intended for building, not for users. While reading around, I found people saying that Packman isn’t necessary for most users these days. According to the openSUSE Wiki, it should be sufficient to just have openh264 installed from the extra repo. However, I’ve swapped all of my packages away from Packman and can’t get it to work. ffplay ink.\(2014\).1...

openSUSE Forums
Show threadIBBoard1d ago

Let's see whether I get an answer, and how usable Discourse wants to be. As far as forum software goes, I hate it. It's awful. Especially the auto-close on topics, so you can't come back and go "Actually, I fixed it!".

Surely you could at least have an "OP can resurrect the ticket" setting so that new people can't necro-post, but the OP can prevent the topic just sitting there unresolved when there is actually an answer 🙄

Give me a proper phpBB system or Simple Machines Forum any day (or vBulletin if you _really_ must)

Show threadIBBoard1d ago

The down side of snapshots during updates is that if you chop and change packages a lot as you try to test and fix things then you can run out of disk space 😄 Just got a "low disk space" warning!

Edit: Either that or it's because I've still got NVidia modules lying around going back to 6.11.3 when I'm running the 6.19.8 kernel and had nearly 60 kernels in between 🙃 9.5GB of modules!

Show threadIBBoard1d ago

Apparently my OS install is eight and a half years old 😁 I know this because someone in the forum thread noticed that I still had ffmpeg 4 installed rather than ffmpeg 8 and asked how old my system was.

`sudo btrfs subvolume show /.snapshots|grep Creation` gives you a creation date for btrfs subvolumes (which Snapper uses for snapshots). And mine reports October 2017.

This is the power of rolling distros and filesystem-level snapshots!

(My system may actually be a bit less than that, because I might have had to reinstall once and just reused the volumes - but that's the only date that I can find)

#openSUSE #Tumbleweed

Show threadIBBoard1d ago

There's two directories in /boot/ that are dated October 2017. I guess that could still be legacy stuff from an old install, though.

/etc/os-release gets updated with snapshot version numbers, so I can't use that as a reference.

But my LVM partition for /home was created in 2012. So I've been carrying _some_ bits of this install around much longer 😆

Ah… /var/log has files from October 2017 (apparently nothing ever wrote to `mail.warn` on my system!). I'm less likely to have migrated a /var partition across and not nuked it during install. So yeah. Probably eight and a half years!

Show threadIBBoard1d ago

Further confirmation that my system has probably been running since 2017:

1) I checked file dates in 2024 and got the same answer - https://hachyderm.io/@ibboard/113255462013789291

2) A little bit before that, I had to dig out a DVD with Tumbleweed on and it was a 2017 image 😆 https://hachyderm.io/@ibboard/113250442416866511 (probably still exactly the same DVD in my drawer)

IBBoard (@[email protected])

I think I've been doing rolling updates on the same base install of #openSUSE #Tumbleweed since October 2017! $ ll /etc/machine-id -r--r--r-- 1 root root 33 Oct 23 2017 /etc/machine-id Thank you to Snapper and Btrfs for saving my arse on multiple occasions, so that I could roll back a bad update and not have to reinstall 😁

Hachyderm.io