How I enable restricted multimedia in openSUSE 12.1 KDE

Given that openSUSE 12.1 KDE uses the Gstreamer phonon backend by default, for better multimedia support it makes sense to install just the additional gstreamer plugins as oppose to installing every other multimedia framework known to man kind such as Xine and VLC on top of Gstreamer.

Of course you are free to do as you please but I prefer to keep things to a minimal.

To make openSUSE 12.1 more enjoyable I install a few gstreamer plugins from the Packman repository and some additional packages for K3b.

However, my plan for world domination is ruined by the decision to include Kaffeine as the default media player in openSUSE 12.1 KDE. Unfortunately Kaffeine requires Xine things to function properly :(

So over to plan B, remove Kaffeine and replace it with Dragon Player which is happy to work with any phonon backend such as Gstreamer or VLC.

Enough of the rambling...

Enable the Packman repository

Head over to http://packman.links2linux.org/mirrors and you will see a nice list of mirrors. When using YaST to add the community repository it adds a mirror from Germany. But my precious bandwidth is important so picking a mirror closer to home improves efficiency.

After picking a mirror closer to home, its time for the terminal.

su -c 'zypper addrepo --refresh http://anorien.csc.warwick.ac.uk/mirrors/packman/suse/12.1/ Packman'

With the Packman repository up and running, I now install the good stuff.

su -c 'zypper remove k3b kaffeine && zypper install gstreamer-0_10-ffmpeg gstreamer-0_10-fluendo-mp3 gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad gstreamer-0_10-plugins-good-extra gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ugly transcode k3b-codecs normalize dragonplayer gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad-orig-addon gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ugly-orig-addon'

If you analyse the above, you will see that K3b is removed. I do this to avoid zypper complaining about a vendor conflict. With the openSUSE version out of the way the k3b-codecs package will pull in the Packman version of K3b without zypper complaining.

And that's what I do.