Re: requesting official list of modules and versions for GNOME 2.14

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>]

Hi,

> - subtitles embedded in movies (.mkv, .ogm, dvds) still don't work
> - language selection (audio tracks, subtitles) still doesn't work
> - dvds/vcds still don't work

I have the feeling that in your mails a too rosy picture of 0.8 is
painted.  I don't particularly like looking for and uncovering some of
the dinky parts of GStreamer, but I don't think it's fair to
continuously compare 0.10 and 0.8 only by a bullet list, and not on the
quality of the particular bullet item.

So, for comparison, I tried doing something on 0.8 that you keep
claiming works fine: DVD playback.

I used my 3GHz hyperthreaded home machine - my laptop has a crappy DVD
drive that can't even play most dvd's I have.

DVD 1: "Aardvark'd"

+ choosing audio language works
- subtitles are enabled unconditionally.  There is no way to turn them
off from the menu (it says "no subtitle selection available").
- subtitle shadows bleed over the rest of the image (see
http://thomas.apestaart.org/download/tmp/totem-subtitle.png; I switched
to ximagesink to make the screenshot)
- there's no way to go back to the main menu (nothing happens when
choosing options from the "Go" menu)
- seeking messes up the synchronization; after a seek, the audio is
easily a second off from video (using osssink or alsasink)
- during playback, audio repeatedly stutters in very short bursts;
probably related to the A/V desync
- I did one run where I did not seek at all, just let it play from the
start - A/V was also not in sync already after 90 seconds
- sometimes seeking doesn't do anything at all, period.  I drag and
release the slider, and nothing happens.  No seek, no time update,
nothing.
- while playing it uses 70% CPU and above (using xvimagesink).  Overall
playback is jerky, definately not as smooth as other players.
- during some runs, the initial "boondoggle" logo section at the start
of the disc starts slowing down to a crawl at the end, then takes half a
minute to complete and go to the menu
+ clicking on items in the menu works in the sense that it moves on to
the movie ...
- ... but it didn't actually do what the option said; for example I
chose a different audio track from the menu, and I had the main one.  I
could still choose a different audio track from the menu though.
- during playback, I regularly get criticals; assertions about caps
changes that failed and gst_tag_list assertions
- I've had a few "Internal GStreamer error" messages pop up during
playback; surprisingly, the DVD continued playing just fine :)
- two times, after a seek, it started consuming all my memory and sent
my machine in a swap storm, finally killing totem.

All in all, it's not even watchable if you just pop in the disc and tell
it to play, without doing anything special.


I tried some other DVD's as well:
- "Much ado about nothing": plays the MGM intro (thougn not
deinterlaced), then at the end freezes, waits five seconds, pops up an
Internal GStreamer error dialog, and then renders the first screen of
the menu.  Nothing in the menu works, play does not work, and there's no
way to start the movie.

- "Chasing Amy": strangely enough, this presented me with the file
chooser dialog when picking "Play Disc".  Mplayer plays it fine as a
dvd.  Probably not a GStreamer bug, but something lower down the stack.

- "meeting people is easy": annoyingly, this dvd has a 43 second
"warning" section as the first section.  Amusingly, the position
indicator was jumping back and forth all the time while playing.  At the
end of the section, again the last frew frames slowed to a crawl
completely until they faded out to black, and then I got the menu.  No
error dialog, so good.  I could pick "play" from the menu, and playing
worked.  First seek made the movie stutter.  Movie is not deinterlaced.
Not in sync either.

- "Pixies": does not even start at all.    Clicking play again throws a
bunch of criticals about invalid casts, then segfaults.  Mplayer plays
it.  This is a DVD without menus, as far as I can tell, but with several
tracks.

- "The office series 1": starts, plays the 20 second author organisation
clip.  Second clip is the age guideline clip, which is scrambled until
halfway through.  Third clip is the BBC one.  After this, a GStreamer
dialog pops up, together with an initial frame from the menu.  After
that, nothing works anymore.

These six DVD's were taken from the top of my DVD pile; they all play
fine on my Playstation (my main DVD watching machine).  Overall, my
experience seems to match the experiences from other people out there
from a quick google on "totem gstreamer DVD"  So final score is two
halves out of six - not enough to make it a bullet point pro gstreamer
0.8, I think.

As has been said before in related threads - the DVD support was added
late in the GNOME 2.12 cycle and with clear disclaimers.  Since then,
very little work has been done on it in the 0.8 branch.  I don't expect
much more work to be done there - you're currently the only person doing
any work on the 0.8 branch, and you said that you didn't have a DVD
drive to test with anymore.  So I don't think it can be claimed that DVD
in totem with GStreamer 0.8 works well.  There's a big difference
between making it work on a developer's machine, and making it work
everywhere.

Don't get me wrong here - I think that you did excellent work in getting
as far as you did within the limits of 0.8.  But everyone who has hacked
on DVD support in 0.8 has admitted that there are serious problems in
the 0.8 design when it comes to supporting DVD's.

What are other people's experiences with DVD playback in
totem/gstreamer-0.8 ?

Thomas

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