[CS-FSLUG] Multimedia support in SUSE 9.2

[N. Thompson]

I've encountered something rather disheartening about SUSE Linux 9.2, it works 
nice and fast but kaffeine (the video player) doesn't play back any media 
formats I've tried that actually have a video, it doesn't go far beyond a few 
simple formats. There is also an issue with amaroK in which some streaming 
media such as mp3s from one of the internet radio stations I listen to 
doesn't play but rather simply pops up a download dialog which tries to 
download the stream data to a temporary file instead of playing it and that 
goes on infinitely until I click the cancel button but I never get any music 
out of it.

For the most part Juk works and I can listen to streaming music with kaffeine 
but I hate having things that don't work in the operating systems I use, I 
filled out an information request form on the SUSE web site where I was 
asking them whether or not these issues would also be present in the 
professional edition but I'm not likely to get an answer for another 16 hours 
at least and I'm impatient.

Can someone here with SUSE 9.2 professional tell me whether these issues also 
affect the professional edition, I'm very sadened that multimedia support is 
still rather poor, the video files I tried to play in kaffeine were .mov 
files of my cat back when she was just a few months old.

amaroK would also crash a fair bit but I think that was because of the problem 
with the streaming media, most likely a bug in the program that doesn't cause 
a crash until it tries to close at which point the crash would occur for me.

Mandrake didn't have that great of multimedia support either, back when I was 
using 10.0 I would fetch the mplayer and codec rpms from plf, I could have 
probably compiled the same for SUSE from source on my computer but at the 
rate I have accidents and have to reinstall it wouldn't be worth it to do 
that every time. I want a distribution that works with as little modification 
as possible after the installation, I'm hoping that SUSE 9.2 pro will be that 
distribution but if the multimedia support in the free DVD download is any 
indication I'd be better off waiting for the next version of SUSE or whatever 
distribution might grab my fancy during the wait.

Fred, please tell me the multimedia support in SUSE pro is better than in the 
downloaded DVD version I have, everything else worked so well :-( .

-- 
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