digiKam delegate video preview to phonon. There is no media player in digiKam...

Gilles Caulier

Which Phonon backend and Phonon version do you use? It is also advisable to upgrade your KDE, there is 4.7.4 with a lot of bugfixes or KDE 4.8, and you should have the latest Phonon and Phonon backend versions. Please do not use the xine backend, is has been deprecated, use the gstreamer or the vlc backend instead.

Quoted from FAQ-Digikam:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How can I change the default video player ?
When I double-click on a video thumbnail, it opens -unwanted video 
player-, how could I change it to another video player ?

Start kcontrol then go to KDE Components/File Associations, then click 
on video. Here you have a list of file types with the list of 
applications that can open them.

E.g. if you want another video player for your .avi files, go to 
x-msvideo. The first application listed here will be the default one. "
------------------------------------------------------------------------

... and that is xine. So what has Phonon to do with that? My 
Phonon-installation is ok, everything is working fine, am I missing 
something else?

Hartmut


Am 03.02.2012 09:03, schrieb Gilles Caulier:
> --- Comment #1 from Gilles Caulier<caulier gilles gmail com>   2012-02-03 08:03:53 ---
> digiKam delegate video preview to phonon. There is no media player in
> digiKam...
>
> Gilles Caulier
>

Right...
I was not talking about the video player at all, if you indeed use the Xine video player I am not really surprised it doesn't work, as that is quite old. I was talking about the phonon-backned-xine which uses libxine to handle sound and video playing.
AFAIK the default videoplayer for KDE is Dragonplayer.
Phonon is the multimedia layer in between which addresses your multimedia hardware. Please have a look at the Systemsettings -> Multimedia -> Phonon. There you can see the backend and the version.

Am 03.02.2012 18:38, schrieb Myriam Schweingruber:
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=293173
>
>
> --- Comment #4 from Myriam Schweingruber<myriam kde org>   2012-02-03 17:38:56 ---
> Right...
> I was not talking about the video player at all, if you indeed use the Xine
> video player I am not really surprised it doesn't work, as that is quite old. I
> was talking about the phonon-backned-xine which uses libxine to handle sound
> and video playing.
> AFAIK the default videoplayer for KDE is Dragonplayer.
> Phonon is the multimedia layer in between which addresses your multimedia
> hardware. Please have a look at the Systemsettings ->  Multimedia ->  Phonon.
> There you can see the backend and the version.
>
Ok, I had a look: Xine is my backend, phonon-backend-xine is installed, 
Phonon-driver-version is 4.4.4. I use Xine since long long time and 
everything works fine with Xine. Whenever I installed Opensuse with KDE 
in default installation, most multimedia-things did not work, so why 
should I not use Xine when everything works well? And how shall I know 
that Xine is deprecated? And how shall I know that the answer in 
Digikam-FAQ is not up-to-date (seems so)? If Digikam would work like the 
FAQ says, then everything would be fine ...

Hartmut

I suggest you upgrade your Phonon, you should have version 4.5.0 at least with KDE 4.7.2
It is up to the distributions to change the Phonon backend as they got a message from the Phonon developers about the xine backend more than 7 months ago.
You should try installing the phonon-backend-gstreamer and/or the phonon-backend-vlc and see if that helps.
The default video player is also something the distributions set, AFAIK it should be dragonplayer.

I changed to backend gstreamer and installed dragonplayer. The player 
plays avi, only the sound of mov, no mpg, no dv, no mp3. And this is the 
defaultplayer of KDE ??? And: no video in digikam though I tried an 
avi-file.

Hartmut

Am 03.02.2012 21:13, schrieb Myriam Schweingruber:
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=293173
>
>
> Myriam Schweingruber<myriam@kde.org>  changed:
>
>             What    |Removed                     |Added
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>               Status|NEEDSINFO                   |UNCONFIRMED
>              Version|unspecified                 |4.4.4 (KDE 4.6.x)
>           Resolution|WAITINGFORINFO              |
>
>
>
>
> --- Comment #6 from Myriam Schweingruber<myriam kde org>   2012-02-03 20:13:41 ---
> I suggest you upgrade your Phonon, you should have version 4.5.0 at least with
> KDE 4.7.2
> It is up to the distributions to change the Phonon backend as they got a
> message from the Phonon developers about the xine backend more than 7 months
> ago.
> You should try installing the phonon-backend-gstreamer and/or the
> phonon-backend-vlc and see if that helps.
> The default video player is also something the distributions set, AFAIK it
> should be dragonplayer.
>

Well, as Gilles said earlier, Digikam itself doesn't play videos, but you should be able to watch them with the default player. Also make sure you have all codecs installed for gstreamer, as those are shipped separately in other packages.

I have everything recommended with the name gstreamer installed and can 
view and hear everything with the phonon-backend-gstreamer. Can not find 
anything with the words "gstreamer" and "codecs". Do I miss something?

Hartmut

Am 03.02.2012 22:16, schrieb Myriam Schweingruber:
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=293173
>
> --- Comment #8 from Myriam Schweingruber<myriam kde org>   2012-02-03 21:16:51 ---
> Well, as Gilles said earlier, Digikam itself doesn't play videos, but you
> should be able to watch them with the default player. Also make sure you have
> all codecs installed for gstreamer, as those are shipped separately in other
> packages.
>

gstreamer calls these plugins, you need the "ugly" and the "bad" plugins to get all proprietary ans patented codecs.

Everything installed and: nothing - no reaction

Dragonplayer still doesn't work?

Dragonplayer is working, but: my originally wish was to view my camera-videos within digikam and there is no change in the behavior of digikam. Drangonplayer plays avi and is the default player for avi and if I click on an avi, a white sheet is shown ...

Gilles, I send this back to you, I see no problem with Phonon.

Harmut,

Do you have an AVI file to test in local ? If it's no too large, you can send it by private mail. Just take a small video with your camera for ex.

Gilles Caulier

The files are not the problem, the behavior with "mov" is the same. And, as I mentioned, I use the same files with digikam 2.2 and 1.8. I have two OS on my computer: Opensuse 11.4 with KDE 4.5 and digikam 1.8 and Opensuse 12.1 with KDE 4.7.2 and digikam 2.2, both with the same configuration. The first version is working well with those videos, the second not.

I also cannot play videos in digikam, and I think I found the cause of the problem and a workaround.  I noticed that in the MIME Types tab of the configure tool, the edit box for "Additional image file extensions" contained the string "avi;jpg;mov".  This leads me to suspect that digikam was treating AVI and MOV files as if they were images (hence the "Could not load image" error message when trying to display a movie).  I cleared that edit box, but that in itself did not fix the problem.  I then had to go to the Collections tab, and remove and re-add my photo collection.  This forced digikam to rescan my entire collection. After that, I can now play video files in digikam.

I found something, what can lead to the solution. 

First: i have a notebook, on which I installed the same OS in the same kind of my desktop. Opensuse 12.1 with KDE 4.7. an digikam 2.4. The I copied a bunch of files (photos and camera-videos) from my desktop to the notebook and started digikam. And: digikam played the videos! So I compared the installations rpm by rpm and found no difference of significance (ati vs nvidia-driver). And no difference with the mime-types!

Second: the installation is the same, the files are the same, so waht is the difference between both digikam's? It lasted a few weeks until I had the idea: it is the database! On my desktop the photos are from digikam 0.8 or so and the database was updated a few times. On my notebook the database is fresh!

Third: a had no desire to make a new database, because there are more than 60.000 photos in my picture-folder. That took me some days and I had the idea: if I get digikam to update the files in the database, perhaps I find something? I renamed a not playing MOV-File from filename.MOV to filename.mov and digikam played it from then on. So you think, it something with the mime-types and it's case-sensitive? Wrong: I renamed a anotherfile.mov to anotherfile.MOV and it played! The same with AVI and avi. So I searched my whole picture-folder for MOV with digikam which makes digikam output MOV and mov, and renamed all to MOV and then again everything to mov, so I was sure to rename every file. The same with avi and now everything is fine! All videos are playing ...

And I found out, that a video within digikam is not played by the default player of KDE. KDE plays MOV-files with ffplay and this is configured. Ffplay plays MOV-files fine, xine plays, but with wrong colors, so I can see, that it is not ffplay, which is working in digikam.

Hope, it helps

Hartmut

Posted from mailing list :

I had the same problem using digikam 2.6.0 with Macports.
A previous Version of digikam (an older Version of phonon was installed)
didn't had the problem, the playing of videos was working fine.
With dtruss I found out that there was a problem like "phonon module not
loaded".
So i decided to activate the previous installed phonon Version @4.4.2_3 and
it worked.
With phonon @4.6.0_0 I had no luck.

Hope that helps...

Regards

Arne

Is this still valid with the current Phonon-bakcneds for gstreamer (4.6.3) and vlc (0.6.2)?

This bug is still existing. mov's are playing within Digikam without picture. What I want to know: what happens, when I cklick on a video? what program is called? Gilles has said, that the kde-aktion is called that stand in kde-systemsettings first, so the same aktion, if I click on a video with left-mouse-button within the filemanager. If so, all would be fine ...

(In reply to comment #21)
> This bug is still existing. mov's are playing within Digikam without
> picture. What I want to know: what happens, when I cklick on a video? what
> program is called? Gilles has said, that the kde-aktion is called that stand
> in kde-systemsettings first, so the same aktion, if I click on a video with
> left-mouse-button within the filemanager. If so, all would be fine ...

Did you test both Phonon backends? That is what my question is about. Those can be changed in the KDE System settings -> Multimedia -> Phonon -> Backend tab. It is important to resart KDE so the new backend is loaded.

Did you dothat for the 4.6.3-version of the phonon-backend-gstreamer and the 0.6.2 version of the phonon-backend-vlc?

I will not test any backend or plugin. The only thing I want to know: How is digikam playing videos? 

Why should I test different backend, plugins, programs and so on? I tested so much without any difference. My computer is playing everything. So: if I know how digikam does play videos, I can search for the problem.

Well, as you can see from the product: this is not a Digikam bug, but a bug with phonon, and if you file bugs you need to be prepared to test something, else it is of not much help.

Gilles, can you test? I simply don't have any test files, so this is not going anyway far without even that...

I'm willing to test, but not the way as before "install this, install that" and so on. If you answer my question I will test no matter if it's digikam or phonon, but my way ...

Digikam uses Phonon, Phonon uses plugins. Depending on whether it works with one plugin but not the other it may be an issue with the subsystem or that specific plugin.

And what uses KDE eg. Dolphin? ? I thought, it is phonon ...

Sorry, but works fine for me.
KDE 4.10.3
DigiKam 3.1.0
Phonon using HEAD, Phonon-VLC using HEAD
Arch

This problem is not reproducible since digiKam use QtAv framework + ffmpeg to handle video files