Playing Movie Files

You can choose between several movie players shipped with your openSUSE. Kaffeine, for example, can be run with several back-ends, such as Xine and MPlayer.

To start Kaffeine, press Alt+F2 and enter kaffeine.

The formats you can view with Kaffeine depends on the back-end (by default, Xine is used). Xine interprets many of the most common multimedia formats available. For more information, refer to http://www.xine-project.org/.

In case the format is not supported by the player's engine, openSUSE offers to search for a suitable codec which you can then install with YaST.

Figure 19.6. Kaffeine Main Window

Kaffeine Main Window

Kaffeine can also play multimedia streamed over the Internet, and can be used as a plug-in for Konqueror. It provides the usual options for playing files in full screen mode, navigating through files, and more. You can also take a snapshot of the video and save it as an image.

KDE 4 also ships with Dragon Player, included in the dragonplayer) package. Dragon Player uses the Phonon, which is a multimedia API that connects to any of several multimedia frameworks. If Dragon Player is installed, start it by pressing Alt+F2 and entering dragon. For more information on using Dragon Player, refer to the online help.