On Tue, 31 Mar 2020 at 23:25, t_pol <t_pol@tiscali.it> wrote:
Hi list,

I've decided to switch from nouveau to Nvidia drivers.
Everythings seems ok but I cannot play anymore h24 videos.
Both VLC & SMPLAYER just play sounds but no video.

this is the error message:

Codec not supported:
VLC could not decode the format "h264" (H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10))

Before the switch everything were OK.

I'm running Fedora 31 on an a laptop HP Pavilion dv5. 

Thanks in advance for any suggestion.

Angelo


This is a common problem that runs across distros:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=303173 
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/530278-VLC-not-playing-mp4-files  
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=169279  

Workarounds include configuration tweaks and using ffmeg to reencode a file
to get something VLC supports.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding  explains the underlying
problem:  

The commercial use of patented H.264 technologies requires the payment 
of royalties to MPEG LA and other patent owners. MPEG LA has allowed
 the free use of H.264 technologies for streaming Internet video that is free 
to end users, and Cisco Systems pays royalties to MPEG LA on behalf of 
the users of binaries for its open source H.264 encoder.  

Is your video "streaming Internet video that is free to end users"?    Do you
have rpmfusion ffmeg and vlcextras?

 -- 
George N. White III