I was also disappointed with Suse. I personally think that any *Desktop* distro must come with lots of audio and video codecs. FC4 has the same problems as also Ubuntu I think.
I have used Suse and FC4 for long durations. Currently, I am using Ubuntu 5.10 and I have no problems playing audio/video at all! The reason why most plugins dont come preinstalled is because most of these plugins are proprietary. But you can always install them using your package manager. For example, to play audio files, simply install gstreamer-plugins in Ubuntu using apt-get or Synaptic and it will install all available audio codecs available. Same for video with xinelibs. Once I mark these two packages for download, Synaptic downloads all codecs/plugins necessary to play any type of audio/video files (except windows media, ofcourse). -- Regards, Sanket Medhi, sanketmedhi [at] gmail [dot] com