[CS-FSLUG] Another SUSE complaint

[Jukka]

2005/10/15, Nathan T. <celerate at gmail.com>:
> Hi everyone, I decided to test out SUSE's supposedly restored ability to
> play mp3's just to be disappointed. SUSE has for the last few release has
> been a joke for multimedia support, version 10.0 isn't very different in
> this case either. Two programs on the whole system can actually play mp3's,
> one is RealPlayer (yuck!) and the other is amaroK using the helix (ie:
> RealPlayer again) backend. I like KDE a lot more than Windows, and was
> pleased when things seemed to be going well with SUSE which does look like a
> much more professional distribution, but when multimedia support is anything
> but present and the only multimedia player to be able to play mp3's has a
> 3-5 second lag time changing the volume I really can't justify using it and
> wouldn't buy a boxed set if it costed $1 and was the only OS on earth.
>
>  I'm really not sure whether it would be easier to get third party packages
> to fix the multimedia support, install Mandriva 2006 instead and see how
> that works out, or whether I should simply stop wasting my time with this
> crippleware. SUSE isn't the only distribution to have dumped almost all
> multimedia support, in fact over the years it seems like I've heard of or
> tried several dozen distributions which decided to cripple multimedia
> support to the point where it isn't there. Why is it that no distribution to
> date (aside from TurbuLinux which I don't like) is actually attempting to
> include good multimedia support out of the box?
>
>  I know I'm going to be told that I can add the multimedia support in very
> easily, but that hasn't been my experience with SUSE; I have managed it with
> Mandrake thanks to the PLF rpms, but every time I've tried it with SUSE it
> greatly reduced the stability of several applications. I'm willing to try
> installing better multimedia support, in fact I've already downloaded the
> packman.links2linux.org xine RPMs and plan on installing them later, but I'm
> going to want to have mp3 support restored to all of KDE, not just amaroK.
> I'm also hoping to get better support for video formats too, if someone
> wants to volunteer information that would make this easier I'm all ears.

I have been in OpenSuse mailing-list from the beginning and there has
been a lot of discussion/complaints about lack of multimedia codecs,
and the answer has been every time that freely downloadable
distributions _cannot_  include non-free/patented codecs because of
the potential lawsuits (I bet you did know this already - didn't you
:) . I think if you buy a boxed distribution from Novell, you get
those missing codecs - because Novell has paid their licences. I'd
like to help you to download those codecs from somewhere, but I
haven't done it myself for a long time (I don't play much music/videos
with computer). Sorry :(

Blessings,
Jukka