Openoffice media player

[Klaasjan Brand]

On Mon, 2005-05-02 at 14:19 +0200, tony wrote:
> > Totem as shipped by Fedora never included the capability to playback
> > those formats. Maybe you replaced it with a version using Xine as a
> > back-end?
> 
> What does totem actually play? It does not seem capable of playing any
> media I have available.

Totem is just the player front-end and will only play whatever the back-
end is able to play. Fedora Totem uses gstreamer which is only able to
play unpatented formats, which means no mp3, no mpeg, no divx. It does
play ogg audio and maybe ogg theora video. It's also capable of reading
from a video4linux source (webcam, tv card).

> > You can try the gstreamer-ffmpeg module (not packaged in an easy way
> > afaik) or replace Totem with Totem-xine. (see rpm.livna.org)
> 
> I have an even better solution: xine with a xine front end... Everything
> else comes from livna and dag yum repositories (ffmpeg, dvd...,
> libfoo...).

Of course you can use something else.

> On the other hand we have totem which with gstreamer (last time I tried
> that it sucked all life from my CPU) plays - nothing! 

But is totally patent-free ;)

But really: there's a lot of effort going into gstreamer and it's really
working if you have the right codecs. If you want you may even file
bugs ;).
One of the big advantages a unified media framework gives you is that
all a/v applications can use the installed codecs. Which means in the
long run less work for you (compiling, installing etc).

> This is tongue in cheek but IMVHO a decent HOWTO get and install
> something that just works now and today is much more useful to the end
> user than something that may be taken up by KDE and become the standard
> in the we don't know when futur. I does put into perspective all the
> stupid hoops US patents and DCMA and whatever laws makes Redhat have to
> jump through. 
> 
> And by the way, the totem interface is as ugly as sin. (Just had to get
> that out of my system)

Ugly as in "uses sane widgets and menu's"? Personally I like it a lot
more than the "skinnable" media players; they always seem to have a lot
of tiny buttons and waste screen space for graphics.

Klaasjan