SUSE & openSUSE

Tips,Tricks, Tutorials,How Tos and Troubleshooting suse linux

SongBird - free iTunes like Media player and web browser

Posted by admin on 11th September 2008

Songbird is a free opensource customizable media player and web browse powered by Mozilla. Songbird runs on Mozilla’s XULRunner platform, thus capable of running on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux. On the Windows and Macintosh platforms, Songbird utilizes the VideoLAN Client for media playback. For Linux & Solaris, Songbird utilizes the GStreamer media framework instead of VideoLAN. The Qtrax client is based on Songbird.

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Posted in Media Player, multimedia | 18 Comments »

Enabling Desktop Effects/Compiz Fusion cause Video Playback issues

Posted by admin on 30th June 2008


In openSUSE 10.0 & openSUSE 11.0, enabling Desktop effects or Compiz Fusion can cause Video Playback issues and in some cases, there will not be any video displayed. This happens on Intel Display chipset based PCs and Laptops.

The problem seems to be with the Intel Display (XV) drivers. The XVideo extension is not composite aware and draws blue instead of video on areas where the composite manager is doing work. To workaround this issue, you need to switch favorite video player’s output from XV to X11, XImage or XShm.

NOTE: Doing this has can cause degraded performance issues on your Desktop or laptop. This is a workaround only.

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Posted in multimedia | 2 Comments »

VideoLAN - VLC Media player and Streaming server

Posted by admin on 23rd June 2008


VLC media player is a free opensource cross-Platform media player and streaming server for Linux,UNIX,Windows, MacOS and many other *NIX versions. VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

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Posted in multimedia | 3 Comments »