Re: Totem to play audio files

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Frank:

> I was wondering why the default audio player in Gnome is Totem movie
> player. If I open an audio file it looks like this:
> http://frank.niedermann.name/stuff/totem-audio.png
> This window looks a bit clumsy because the video section (left) is not
> usefull at this moment and the playlist size is too small.
>
> I think it would be better to just display needfull things while playing
> audio files like Rhythmbox Music player does with View/Small Display:
> http://frank.niedermann.name/stuff/rhythmbox.png
>
> Here all important commands and informations for playing audio files are
> available and not much space is wasted.
>
> If Rhythmbox may be too complex as default audio player in Gnome what
> about a compromise like Eina:
> http://bolgo.cent.uji.es/proyectos/eina#shots

At Sun, the only free media player we ship is totem.  I think any media
play that uses GStreamer is an exciting product.  My understanding is
that the plugin support for GStreamer 0.10 will really start to provide
an end-user experience that is competitive.  Clicking on Fluendo's
"Products" button [1] shows that some exciting legal-to-use and popular
plugins are available.   I think this is great progress to getting
reasonable [2] media support on UNIX.

That said, lots of people on Solaris think totem sucks since it only
supports au, WAV and ogg-vorbis.  Support is already much better in
OpenSolaris with theora, speex, flac, and monkeybrainz support.  And
if end-users can buy plugins to support more rich formats, I think
media software on UNIX will be much more popular.

I'm not sure if Rhythmbox is a better program, but perhaps we should
switch to using it in OpenSolaris, or ship both.  I'd be interested to
hear a recommendation.

Brian

[1] http://www.fluendo.com/
[2] or at least not so abhorrent