Has anyone gotten DVD playback with Totem to work in 9.3? When I try to play a DVD I get the following error:
Unexpected error status 256 while mounting /media/cdrecorder
It also isn't playing .mpg or .wmv files; it appears to be missing plugins. All of this worked fine in 9.2. I also tried installing Kaffiene, but it and the plugins for Totem all seem to depend on libFLAC.so.4, which I haven't found yet. I'll keep looking, but any suggestions on what to do would be appreciated.

You may need to have the libdvdcss library installed also Go here: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.html and download the Essential Codecs package.

OK, this is turning out to be a HUGE mess. Suse has really screwed this up. First, the xine-lib package did not install, even though Totem can't do anything without it. After installing this I can get sound from mpeg clips. Second, according to the Totem home page, Totem 1.0 requires gstreamer 0.8.8 & version 0.8.7 for the plugins. Suse 9.3 installs version 0.8.9 of all the gstreamer packages. I don't know what kind of problems this may create. To play mpeg files it appears you need the gstreamer-ffmpeg package, which is not on the CDs or any of the mirrors so far. The newest version of this package I can find is 0.8.4, which requires gstreamer-tools; also not included on the CDs. Even after installing both of these packages, I still get no video ouput from Totem for mpg files. I haven't managed to get anywhere at all with wmv files or DVDs. I have libdvd-css, and just about every other DVD related package on the CDs installed; but I keep getting the same error. Has everyone who upgraded to 9.3 gone through this, or is it just me? If anyone gets totem to play anything in 9.3 I'd like to hear how they did it. Finally, there is a program called pia4 in the menu under video playback. It is the default application from nautilus, and it plays both mpg & wav files if you open them from nautilus. However, it doesn't run when you select it from the menu. It also doesn't have any controls for pause, ff, rewind, etc. What a disaster.

Just how did SuSE do that?

Since Totem is what you are trying to use, I would have thought sorting this out would be a priority.

After installing what you said didn't install? I'm confused!

You can't find it anywhere? Perhaps this can help: http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/download/fedora.html

I think you should uninstall all these packages you are having trouble with, work on getting one of them to work first. I suggest Xine or Mplayer.

Hi,
Sounds like Nexus has some good advice. I have just installed MPlayer on my 9.3 system. Works fine.

It wasn't without problems though.
Since I couldn't find a 9.3 binary I decided to get the tar.gz package and compile my own (don't know if the 9.2 binary would have worked).
Far as I could work out the 9.3 CDs don't have a gtk-devel files for the 1.2.x version needed by MPlayer. After much troubling I removed the glib and gtk 1.2 files with YAST and downloaded the tar packages from the internet. After compiling and installing the new glib and gtk packages, the compile of MPlayer worked (well, the configuration script found all it needed).

MPlayer is a very nice program though, highly recomend it.

Here's a nice DVD HowTo that does a really nice job of explaining what you need to do to get various DVD players working

Totem worked fine for DVDs, mpegs, & wmv files in 9.2, and didn't work at all after I upgraded. When I said that Suse really screwed up, that is what I was referring to. In my opinion an upgrade should not break existing software without at least warning the user that it is deleting packages that might be important. The rest of the upgrade was fine. I wasn't trying to imply that all of 9.3 was a mess, just the way the multimedia packages were handled. I'm hoping that this is an isolated incident, and that most people have better luck with their upgrades.

As for the gstreamer packages, I should have been more specific. I couldn't find packages for Suse anywhere. I found ones for Mandrake and Redhat, but installing the Mandrake ones didn't help with getting Xine or Totem to work. In the end I installed Kaffeine, which removed some of the earlier Xine packages I had installed in my attempts to get Totem working. This seemed odd, but Kaffeine worked fine on the first install for both DVDs & movie clips. I then went ahead and removed Totem and the remaining unused Xine packages. Maybe I'll try a fresh install of Totem at a later date, but for the moment I'll stick with Kaffeine. I haven't tried Mplayer in a long time, but a lot of people keep recommending it so maybe I'll try it out again in the future.

SuSE crippled the DVD playback in the release (as usual), due to the ambiguous nature of the law in some countries I assume.

For 9.3 they are/were supposed to be making a lot of the packages available via the YaST update sources (I think).

However I always get my multimedia stuff from the packman site and it always works. I just have to remember to do it each time I do an upgrade.

I am reasonably new to Linux, having come all the way from BBC via DOS. Linux is basically a good
system. I havit it networked at home with XP and the laptop. It is performing well, even using the Windows
network printers. BUT multimedia on Linux is the most god-awfull experience. I have completely given up trying to get a single Linux package to work properly. Different versions get put in different places. I am using RH9 which seems to accept just about anything thrown at it EXCEPT anything to do with movie playback.


Until the Linux world can get this right I am continuing to use the hated enemy. Viewing various fora, it is clear that this area is the worst minefield in the Unix world. Considering the Linux programmers are as good as any, i find it amazing that no one has yet come up with a complete package you can simply install and run. Shame on you all !!!