Openoffice media player

[Rodd Clarkson]

> > 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).

Just to clear any confusion here, gstreamer is capable of playing most
formats.  The version included in Fedora is limited to just open
formats.  Any format with dubious patents or licenses isn't included,
but that's a fedora decision.

Luckily, the gstreamer guys have compiled the rpms for gstreamer into a
selection of packages that seperate the free codecs from the patented
ones, which means you don't have to do much more than add the non-free
ones to get support for them in Fedora.
 
<snip>

> > 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.

I agree.  Each to his own.  Personally I love that totem is so plain
that it's not a distraction.


Rodd