You need third party repositories if you want full ffmpeg with h.264 support, and since these are binary (IIRC) repos, each third-party package is often either compatible with the latest or older snapshot, or tumbleweed, but often not both (unlike Arch's AUR which only has one distro to target, though it's a moving target).
The conversation was about getting packages "in the main repo instead of an untrusted AUR". I used Tumbleweed a few years ago. To get a package selection as rich as the full AUR (which is very broad but not 100% comprehensive for niche packages), I had to use multiple package repos besides Packman, and many packages I wanted didn't ship Tumbleweed builds (reminding me of my experiences with Ubuntu's PPAs).
