I initially sought help for this issue on reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/9uaztc/digikam_and_video_files_no_thumbnails_cannot_play/), but since I've had no response I thought I'd go straight to the source.

Per KDE's documentation, Digikam should be able to render a thumbnail of a supported movie format (.MOV in my case) and play it. (https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extragear-graphics/digikam/using-movieformats.html

However, I have not experienced this. In my experience, Digikam identifies a given video file as .MOV, but neither renders a thumbnail for it nor plays the file. When I attempt to play it, it says:

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An error has occurred to show item [file name].

Have others experienced this? Can I resolve this issue? I have both libqtav and ffmpeg installed on my system.

Current software versions are:
Fedora 28
KDE Plasma Version: 5.13.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.51.0
Qt Version 5.11.1
Kernel Version: 4.18.16-200.fc28.x86_64

Hi,

It seems that video is a compiled time feature. And it is not activated by default on Fedora. You can look at the SRPM that comment the dependency and these KDE and Fedora bugs to have more information about the issue.

bbo wrote:Hi,

It seems that video is a compiled time feature. And it is not activated by default on Fedora. You can look at the SRPM that comment the dependency and these KDE and Fedora bugs to have more information about the issue.

Thank you for your quick response bbo. After reading those links, I now understand why my videos do not play in Digikam -- Fedora et al. cannot simply ship software that does not adhere to its legal parameters.

Does this mean that in order to fix said issue, I would have to compile Digikam from scratch utilizing instructions such as those found here?

Could a complete version of Digikam be made available as a flatpak? I'm an novice end-user who -- while not possessing formal training in Linux or system administration -- nonetheless wishes to embrace FOSS as much as possible. Having said that, I don't think I've ever been successful at compiling a single program from scratch on a Linux system. I'm usually met with some unsolvable (for me) error even when following compiling instructions verbatim.

If my only choice is to compile the program from scratch in order to get full functionality, I'm afraid I'll have to pursue other software -- possibly deviating from my goal of using FOSS for all of my computing needs. This would be unfortunate as I'm a medical professional by vocation and gravitated to FOSS and Linux in general following Edward Snowden's revelations. Initially my needs were simply a pursuit of better information security and privacy but have grown to encompass other aspects of personal computing such as multimedia creation, editing, and management.

I like Digikam, KDE, and Fedora more than any combination I've tried thus far. I hope there could be a workable solution for this issue in the future.

Hi !

notachance wrote:Does this mean that in order to fix said issue, I would have to compile Digikam from scratch utilizing instructions such as those found here?

To me, a simpler solution would be to get the AppImage here. It seems that ffmpeg in bundled in it.

notachance wrote:Could a complete version of Digikam be made available as a flatpak?

At the moment, it seems that digikam team does not provide flatpak for its stable releases. Only for nightly releases (development version). If you're feeling adventurous or want to help the development team by testing the next release, you can grab it from the KDE flatpak repository. Based on these instructions, something like the following should work :

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flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists kdeapps --from https://distribute.kde.org/kdeapps.flatpakrepo
flatpak install kdeapps org.kde.digikam


But, to be honest, I do not know if this flatpak is built with video support.