How to Install Media Codecs on OpenSUSE

Posted on by Andrew Bell One min read

Add Packman repo (example is for Tumbleweed)

sudo zypper ar 
http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/packman/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/Essentials 
packman-essentials

To make sure the Packman repo is not used for everything, reduce the priority.

sudo zypper mr -p 110 packman-essentials

Install the restricted multimedia packages from Packman

sudo zypper in --from packman-essentials -f 
gstreamer-plugins-bad-orig-addon gstreamer-plugins-ugly-orig-addon 
gstreamer-plugins-libav libavcodec57 k3b-codecs vlc-codecs chromium-ffmpeg
gstreamer-plugins-bad-orig-addon gstreamer-plugins-ugly-orig-addon

These are most important packages.

k3b-codecs vlc-codecs chromium-ffmpeg

I am using kde so the k3b codecs are useful. VLC & chromium codecs are obviously useful if you use these apps.

gstreamer-plugins-libav libavcodec57

are needed if you want to encode H.264.

For normal day-to-day updates, use:

sudo zypper dup --no-allow-vendor-change

This is now the deault for openSuse so the update applets will also work.

There should be only about 30 packages from Packman. You can check by running:

zypper pa | egrep "^i.*packman-essentials" -c

If needed, you can run the following to prevent repo conflicts:

sudo zypper dup --from packman-essentials