Re: My take on Totem and GStreamer

[Mark Finlay <sisob eircom net>]

On Wed, 2003-05-28 at 13:08, Julien MOUTTE wrote:
> Hi Jeff,
> 
> I've already done a big part of backend porting in Totem for GStreamer.
> 
> As soon as GStreamer core version 0.6.2 will be out it will be really 
> stable and support lot of medias.
> 
> IMHO the only big feature which is not in gst enabled totem is DVD playback. 
> And that will be a tough one if we are willing to do it correctly.
> 
> I would be really interested to get feedback from people using totem with 
> gstreamer backend to see what's missing in that port.

I just tried out totem HEAD with the gstreamer backend with gstreamer
0.6.1:

* As hadess said there is no error handling. Three of my videos use
an audio codec not supported by gstreamer. Totem just crashed when I
tried to play them.

* Totem's nice properties dialog is useless as there is no codec
information is displayed. It'd be great to get this working.

* It's a lot slower than the xine backend. It takes a while to start a
video, and sometimes the audio starts first, and the ui goes
unresponsive for a few seconds, then the video starts.

------

With that said, if even the first of those was sorted out then I'd be
happy to include it in the desktop. I don't think that Xine is an option
and an imperfect video player is better than none. Plus it would give
great encouragment to the gstreamer team, not to mention loads of bug
reports.

One thing though: If we do ship totem with the gstreamer backend we
should remove the dvd menu items if that functionality doens't work.

-------

I'm gonna go try out gstreamer 0.6.2 from cvs, but it does seem to me
that most of the important work needs to be done on the totem side -
adding support for more codecs can be done any time...

-- 
Mark Finlay <sisob eircom net>