As for all major Linux distributions SUSE comes with almost no support for multimedia. At least mp3 playback is possible via Real Player or amaroK if you install “amarok-helix” and choose it as playback engine for amaroK. If mp3 support is all you want, you’re set! But I like to go a little further here.

Almost all you need for this purpose Packman has it! Just add this repository to smart. If you added Packman with the default settings you will get a bunch of new packages the next time you do a smart update/upgrade replacing the one’s from SUSE by Packman’s. There’s nothing wrong with this, but I like to stay closer with SUSE. So, when adding the Packman repository to smart I selected “-10” as priority. This way, I can manually choose which packages from Packman I’d like to install.

If you followed the “-10 priority”-part you now need to install the packages manually. Open the smart-gui and search for the following packages and mark them for installation/removal (packages by Packman have “pm” in their name):

INSTALL:

  • libxine1 (from Packman)
  • xine-ui (from Packman)
  • xine-skins (from Packman)
  • speex (for amd64: both, the x86_64 and i686 from Packman)
  • xmms (from Packman)
  • xmms-lib (from Packman)
  • faad2-xmms-plugin (from Packman)
  • xmms-mac (from Packman)
  • xmms-shn (from Packman)

REMOVE:

  • speex-32bit (from SUSE)
  • xmms-plugins (from SUSE)

Once those packages and their dependencies are installed you should be able to listen to mp3’s and watch most movie formats - with the exception of DVDs… I’ll cover that later, as this is a little tricky and in some countries not even legal.