Hi guys,

I'm having a big problem with MP3 playback on my SUSE Linux 10 box (x86_64).

Neither XMMS, Amarok nor Xine will play MP3s (Amarok simply doesn't play on arts or xine output; putting it on GStreamer output simply makes it play every track sequentially but 0 seconds of each track). In Xine, I get the message "No demuxer plugin available" - despite ffmpeg and libffmpeg being installed.

Anyone else had this problem?

hmm, only a little suggestion:

try to put into your yast installation sources the packman archive: packman.iu-bremen.de and then the path to suse10.

there you find a lot audio and video programs for opensuse10/suse10. just try to install all mpg-programs via the search tool in yast->install-software.

perhaps this helps. usually opensuse10.0 comes without mpg support...

^ Thanks for the idea - I already have the Packman sources and a number of other RPM repositories (that's in fact where I've installed things like ffmpeg from) - unfortunately, somehow MP3 playing on my system seems to have broken

did you already try to reinstall all multimedia components including kdemultimedia or whatever multimedia package of your preferable windowmanager?

Yep. This appears to be quite a common problem. I had a problem with Amarok (which uses the Xine engine for playback) not being able to play, of all things, OGG files!

I'm one of those really geeky types who documents everything I do with Linux (believe me, it's helped me in the past when I was scratching my head asking, "now how did I do that again?"), so I'll just share my notes here with you to avoid having to type so much again, but first: the short version.

Xine establishes a hidden directory in every user's home directory called .xine. For a SuSE user named donald, that path looks like this: /home/donald/.xine. Inside this directory there should be a symbolic link to the actual plugin directory which Xine uses for all its stuff. If that link is missing, at least one or more media formats are not going to play correctly. I don't fully understand why it became necessary for me to sort out by hand (it used to work and suddenly just stopped), but it's working again so far. Here's the details:

Problem Resolution for Xine Not Finding Demuxer Plugins
18 July 2007

Background:

I was having trouble playing, of all things, ogg files in Amarok. Realizing I used Xine as the engine for Amarok, I began investigating.

Investigations:

I found that Xine, upon attempting to play an ogg, threw an error message to the effect that it could not find a demuxer plugin for ogg. Clicking on "More" in the error window brought up the debugging information, and on the "Plugins" tab, I found all the plugins from the directory /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.1.5 were found, but a cryptic message at the bottom of the window advised Xine had skipped over the unreadable directory /home/horus/.xine/plugins. It turns out this directory did not exist.

I at first thought I'd create that directory, and that would be that: Xine would loop back on itself and magically everything would work, right? Wrong! I got oggs playing by copying the appropriate demuxer plugin into the new directory, but then I got to thinking, "Wait, I shouldn't have to copy all my plugins to my home directory." So, I deleted the plugins folder under /home/horus/.xine, and replaced it with a symbolic link to /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.1.5. This was accomplished by issuing the following command from a non-root BASH prompt:

horus@linux:~> ln -s /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.1.5 /home/horus/.xine/plugins

(NOTE: The italicized part is the prompt. You enter the rest. Note also the "dot" in the second argument - it's dot-xine not just plain xine...)

Anyone else using this would be well advised to modify the second argument (/home/horus/.xine/plugins) replacing "horus" with the appropriate username so that the link is created in the right place. It would also be well to check whether 1.1.5 is the current version of the plugin library folder, too. This will depend heavily on which release of Xine you are running.

There's a nice website: http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/

This has a lot of great info on getting Xine to do what you want with MP3's, DVDs, etc.
I hope this info helps with what is really looking like a common cross-distribution problem. Oh, and I use SuSe 10.0 myself, but it's just the 32 bit version. I've found that for certain applications I like to use, 32-bit just works better.

Later On,
D