I am a newbie, just getting my feet wet with Suse 9.3. Everything seems to work just great except... I have multimedia problems.

I have browsed the forums, read the suggestions, and attempted the solutions, and nothing seems to work. I have Kaffeine configured and it plays just about every kind of multimedia file known to man, but:

1. Kaffeine crashes. Randomly. Except when I quit the application, then it crashes predictably. I have tried versions 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, and most recently, 0.60-5 with no improvement. I have recently admitted defeat and switched to kmplayer to watch my DVDs. It lacks all the bells and whistles that Kaffeine offers, but it works.

2. The Kaffeine-Mozilla plug-in works a charm for Windows media streaming, but freezes solid when confronted with Realplayer media (thank heavens for xkill). Kaffeine quite happily plays Realmedia files off my hard drive, but no streaming.

So: I have Kaffeine for Windows media streaming, Realplayer for Realmedia streaming, and stable but featureless kmplayer to watch DVDs and media files. Is this as good as it gets?

My present configuration is:
Kaffeine 0.6-0.pm.0-i686
kaffeine-mozilla 0.2-0.pm.0-i686
Libxine1 1.1.0-0.pm.0-i686
win32 20050412-0.pm.0-i586
libdvdcss2 1.2.9-1-i386
Suse 9.3 Professional (SuSE-Linux-Professional-FTP-i386), fully updated, including additional multimedia packages.

What am I doing wrong...

Thanks for any insights,
Timothy.

you could run Kaffeine from the konsole to check the error that it produces

Well, fifty two views and one reply... So I guess maybe this is as good as it gets. I don't think this will be a show-stopper in my efforts to ditch You-Know-Who, but it sure is a big "nice-to-have".

Does anyone have any thoughts whether Kaffeine plays better with some distributions than others?
Timothy.


P.S. Thanks to all those who did take the time to view the post.

i use debian and it doesnt crash , so thats why you should post the error messages

Well... based on the comment from heema, and the premise that it must work or no-one would use it, I tried running Kaffeine on a quick and dirty install of PCLinuxOS (another story in itself).

And guess what, Kaffeine appears to be rock stable. The DVD that I could almost garantee to crash it, plays just fine. I haven't tried streaming Realmedia yet, but I'll get back to you on that one when I've figured out what to do with this rather untidy installation of PCLOS.

I'll follow up on running Kaffeine from the command line too, and to see what errors it may generate.

Anyway, to all you other newbies out there. Stick with it... it is worth it in the end.

I use Kaffeine with Debian stable, and have no problems--but I also never try to watch streaming internet videos. If you post a couple example urls of streaming realplayer and windows media, I could test to see if I have any problems (or if it even works).

news.bbc.co.uk streams news-bites in your choice of either Windows or Real media. I haven't tried streaming with PCLOS, because it looks like neither Mozilla-Kaffeine nor RealPlayer are installed, or even available through Synaptic.

And I'm still on the learning curve with PCLOS, so it may take a day or two...

So much for Kaffeine being "rock stable" running on PCLOS. It crashed last night...
It is the only aspect of running Linux that annoys me and somehow, it seems to have passed from an annoyance to a crusade.

However, I found this whilst trying to locate the definitive answer:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/f...il/023029.html

I have never tried to build a package from source, but perhaps now would be a great time to learn how? I'm still trying to capture an error message running Kaffeine from a command line, but so far it only seems to crash when started in the GUI. (Coincidence? Or something more sinister.)


By the way, the second install of PCLOS went much better than the first, and I believe I really like it.

Timothy.