Hi! I’m using Digikam in Arch Linux, when using package from yay I can’t watch MP4 videos, the app tells that there is a problem with file, in terminal the error is “Codec h264_cuvid not supported”. Using digikam appimage works but it’s slow. I’m using in a laptop with a GeForce MX150 and proprietary drivers. Thank you!
Does any other video/multimedia player like mpv or vlc play the video (in decent enough speed)?
According to the Nvidia cheat sheet the MX150 does not provide h264 support directly (hardware accelerated) or for any other video format.
My guess would be that a software codec is missing, and the appimage has one build in, but I don’t know what codec Digikams Player would use.
The Archwiki lists x264 as the only h264 codec but x264 claims to be an encoder and a Player would need a decoder(?)
If you are extremely lucky one of the two above mentioned players adds a codec, either directly or through a dependency, that Digikam can use. If not I would try (read: at your own risk) and add FFMPEG and GStreamer to see if one of those provide a usable codec. But without hardware acceleration support I would not be sure if it is at the end really substantially faster than the appimage.
Thank you for reply! I think it is an error related to Qt, with the old versions of digikam I had no problems with videos, since the qt player for videos was introduced I can no longer play them (except using appimage). I can watch the same videos externally with any player, but it’s inconvenient not to be able to use the digikam interface for all operations! FFMPEG and GStreamer are already installed!
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same. And i made the mistake of selecting “show preview” on the welcome wizard and now i’m too lazy to figure out how to change it. Videos are just a pain to browse. No thumbnail, no nothing.
And that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with video card you have. Just broken qt media components. files play fine in ffmpeg and vlc.
On Fedora I’d think it would be gstreamer1-plugin-openh264, so look for the similar plugin package for Arch. There’s also “openh264” which mentions “decoding” in the info:
rpm -qi openh264
Name : openh264
Version : 2.4.1
Release : 2.fc42
Architecture: x86_64
Install Date: Sat 15 Mar 2025 05:33:05 PM EDT
Group : Unspecified
Size : 1135473
License : BSD-2-Clause
Signature : RSA/SHA256, Tue 20 Aug 2024 07:48:46 AM EDT, Key ID c8ac4916105ef944
Source RPM : openh264-2.4.1-2.fc42.src.rpm
Build Date : Tue 20 Aug 2024 07:45:49 AM EDT
Build Host : buildhw-x86-13.iad2.fedoraproject.org
Packager : Fedora Project
Vendor : Fedora Project
URL : https://www.openh264.org/
Bug URL : Bug List
Summary : H.264 codec library
Description :
OpenH264 is a codec library which supports H.264 encoding and decoding. It is
suitable for use in real time applications such as WebRTC.
For me the problem was something odd with nvidia drivers, I need to drain with nvidia-smi then use digikam and all works well (then undrain when done using digikam with a simple bash script).