[SOLVED] VLC (and Dragon Player) can no longer use H264 codec

jdkaye · 07-11-2013, 11:43 PM

I'm using Debian Testing and yesterday I had a substantial (safe) upgrade of packages. One of the effects of the upgrade seems to be that VLC (and KDE's Dragon player) no longer can use the H264 video codec. This change does NOT effect Kaffeine or any mplayer based media player (Kmplayer and Gnome-mplayer work fine). Trying to play an .mp4 file with VCL results in this message:

Quote:

No suitable decoder module:
VLC does not support the audio or video format "h264". Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.

I did a search on this error message and one suggestion was that I download x264-snapshot-20130710-2245 from the VLC website. I did and duly compiled the source code and installed it. No errors and all but no change in the bad behaviour of VLC. "h264" is not the only codec in trouble. I also get this:

Quote:

No suitable decoder module:
VLC does not support the audio or video format "mp4v". Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.

There are others but I think you get the idea. Let me emphasise two things:
1. Until yesterday VLC (and Dragon player) had no problems playing these files.
2. The various media players I mentioned above (Kaffeine, etc.) still play these files with no problem.

I'm sure I'm not alone with this issue. Any suggestions?
Thanks.
jdk

jdkaye · 07-12-2013, 01:18 AM

Solved! Zero credit to me. Another big upgrade today (50+ packages) among them some AV-related packages:

Code:

Setting up libavutil-dev:amd64 (9:1.2.1-dmo6) ...
Setting up libavcodec54:amd64 (9:1.2.1-dmo6) ...
Setting up libavcodec-dev:amd64 (9:1.2.1-dmo6) ...
Setting up libavformat54:amd64 (9:1.2.1-dmo6) ...
Setting up libavformat-dev:amd64 (9:1.2.1-dmo6) ...

So this is one mystery that will never be solved but things are back to normal again. To all those who complain about the stability of Debian Testing/Unstable I say, "Eat worms and die!"

jdk