Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop) [LWN.net]

GnomeDesktop has the second in its series of interviews about Linux multimedia, this time with Totem developer Bastien Nocera. Totem is the GNOME movie player. "I was already well chuffed years ago when distributions started adopting Totem as their default movie player. Even though I'm happy to see it mentioned next to such a venerable institution as the BBC, its selection really has more to do with Totem's position as the GNOME movie player, and all the work being done on that desktop (and the underlying frameworks) by all the contributors, rather than just being 'another movie player'."

to post comments

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 8, 2008 23:47 UTC (Mon) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link] (10 responses)

I don't know if it's my distro packaging or just my preference to the CLI but I prefer mplayer to totem. I've never been able to get the totem Firefox pluging to cause me anything other than grief.

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 9, 2008 0:18 UTC (Tue) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] (6 responses)

I used to think totem was crap too, back when I ran suse - mplayer was the only thing that actually played all types of media, while totem, vlc and others would either pop up a warning about missing codecs, or play things incorrectly (distortion, noise, sound but no video or vice versa, etc)

Since then I've discovered what an uncrippled totem is like. It's great, it plays whatever I've been able to throw at it, and it's my default app for all multimedia in web brower or email content.

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 9, 2008 9:07 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (5 responses)

Ya.. Gstreamer plugs for good, bad, ugly, and (most especially) ffmpeg. That makes me happy.

Nowadays I use:

* MPD with Sonata front-end -- for playing music.

* Mplayer -- for quick command line playing and also for playing movies. (I am very used to the keybindings and I can do much more with mplayer then with GUI stuff)

* Totem -- for most everything, including browser plugin.

* Rhythmbox -- the online radio streaming stuff for Sonata/mpd is a bit junky, but rhythmbox does a good job.

* VLC -- as a backup for media that gives other apps indigestion. It's GUI is just not 'quick' (as in my-to-computer quickness, not speed of application) enough for general everyday use.

------------------

It seems like the gstreamer and Pulse-audio stuff is really beginning to pay off.

With Fedora 10 Totem has been stable. Pulse-Audio has been very good, for the first time ever. The only tweaking to make it work very well was to add myself to the pulse-rt group to get rid of any stuttering under high system loads, and then later on editing the /etc/pulse/daemon.conf to enable realtime-schedualing to make SDL applications sound nice for games and whatnot. Then using 'alsamixer -c0' to tweak the low-level levels.

(I recommend installing the additional pulse-audio related tools like padevchooser and pavucontrol)

There are two things that make it worthwhile. One is that now I can hotplug USB audio devices and have then 'just work'. Everything gets detected and the audio device just shows up and is ready to be used. You can control routing and individual application volumes through the pavucontrol, which is nice (however with multiple audio cards and whatnot the pavucontrol app can cause high cpu loads and possibly cause PA to commit suicide)

The second one is that I can plug in ProjectM-pulseaudio (they have a jack version also) for very good audio visualizations. Blows Totem's stuff out of the water (which decent, but I've gotten used to it).

The last time I remember using something like that did such a nice job was back with the various visualization plugins for the old pre-AOL versions of Winamp.

Oh, and setting up a microphone was easy.

That sort of thing makes me happy. Fedora 10 folks did a pretty good job on it, especially compared to the previous versions of PA.

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 9, 2008 9:42 UTC (Tue) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (3 responses)

Totem-Xine rules if you want ALL formats working flawlessly (including Real and QT and other obscure formats)

Gstreamer sucks if the widest possible selection of formats is what you want.

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 9, 2008 14:07 UTC (Tue) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (2 responses)

Expect that Xine cannot downmix 5.1 audio into 2 channels (including LFE data), and I have a digital camera from which I get .mov videos which are totally corrupted looking when played back with xine.

None of those (gstreamer, xine, mplayer, vlc) is perfect. As an example indeed, it seems this proper LFE handling when downmixing seems to be almost out of reach for all of those. GStreamer used to work by default, but ceased to work at some point. Xine has never worked. MPlayer works with -af pan though the exact settings that have to be used changed once with some rework of the filter I guess. VLC has no options about downmixing LFE. One way to test those is to play back http://www.google.com/search?q="test+ac3+v2.0" or similar file, when using only normal stereo output. You are mostly greeted with silence when the LFE sounds are played back.

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 9, 2008 14:44 UTC (Tue) by Uraeus (guest, #33755) [Link] (1 responses)

Would be great if you posted a short clip to GStreamer bugzilla, we will then add it to our media test suite. We got an automated test suite these days which lets us know right away if any changes makes one of the clips in the suite fails to work properly due to a recent commit.

Also these days I feel pretty confident that if people got all the plugin packages installed, Totem-GStreamer can handle just as many obscure files as Totem-Xine ever could. Not necesarilly all the same files though (which broken files you allow for would vary), but if you had 5000 different files and tried to play them all both with GStreamer and with Xine you would get a similar success percentage.

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 10, 2008 18:37 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

I filed a bug #564019.

Btw, you're right about GStreamer handling about all the file formats Xine does, thanks to ffmpeg plugin and others. However Xine is much more quicker if you eg. use the scroll wheel to seek in videos or switch videos.

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 9, 2008 18:47 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

"Ya.. Gstreamer plugs for good, bad, ugly, and (most especially) ffmpeg"

The gstreamer-ffmpeg plugin is an interesting and important case.

ffmpeg upstream development process seems to continue to be a problem for application developers, to the point where application developers are encourage by the ffmpeg developers to keep a static version of the ffmpeg codebase in their application.
http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2008/12/05/ffmpeg-strikes-ag...
http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2007/07/17/links-for-2007-07...

Now upstream ffmpeg has every right to run their development how they want. They don't think of themselves as a set of system libraries to be relied on for API stability. It's the same sort of problem we had with the gecko rendering engine before the process of xulrunner interfaces stabilization was started.

But having application developers make use of static copies of ffmpeg
has security implications for any distribution which includes multiple applications which want to make use of ffmpeg functionality. If multiple applications are using static copies of ffmpeg's codebase to avoid dealing with ffmpeg API incompatibility problems, that's multiple applications that have to be individually checked and updated if a vulnerability in ffmpeg is discovered. The recommendation that projects depending on ffmpeg use a static copy of the codebase is madness for a distributor.
Do we even have a good accounting of how many applications do that right now in any given distribution or repository? ffmeg vulnerabilities have happened. It's double madness if each application is using different snapshots of ffmpeg and need custom patches to account the API drifting.

The gstreamer-ffmpeg plugin, inside the gstreamer-framework maybe the only existing sane way out of the trap for application developers who want to use some subset of ffmpeg functionality, without causing increased security risks for distributors. If all applications which wanted to use ffmpeg transitioned to gstreamer and used the gstreamer-ffmpeg plugin, then distributions would only have to provide a single version of ffmpeg, and would only have to address vulnerability issues by updating that single version of the ffmpeg codebase installed on the system.

-jef

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 9, 2008 8:20 UTC (Tue) by MisterIO (guest, #36192) [Link] (2 responses)

SMPlayer is better than both Totem and Mplayer(standalone). Its interface is a lot better and speedier than that of Mplayer and it has a lot more options and supported video formats than Totem. VLC too is better than Totem.

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 11, 2008 10:47 UTC (Thu) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link] (1 responses)

Totem's UI taking too long to show up is a known problem, mostly due to the Python support unfortunately. If you're willing to experiment, file a bug, and we could point you in the right direction.

Otherwise, Totem has most of the features SMPlayer has, and you can file bugs for those features important to you. Subtitle and audio delay support are planned in the near future for example.

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 12, 2008 15:38 UTC (Fri) by MisterIO (guest, #36192) [Link]

I went back to this page to update my comment on Totem after having tried version 2.24.3, but having seen your post I'm gonna put this as an answer to it. Totem v. 2.24.3 is clearly better than the previous one, the xine version of course, because the gstreamer version has always had many problems for me(for example audio sync). But I'm trying this version on a new pc a lot more powerful than the previous one and my old comment was also due to performance problems with Totem(only with some important codecs). With the old pc I couldn't play with Totem movies which SMplayer could handle quite good. Now it's the opposite at least for the h264 codec. With Totem now I can play without any problems movies which SMPlayer and Gnome Mplayer cannot handle very well. So my updated comment is that currently Totem-Xine is the best movie player.

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 9, 2008 0:51 UTC (Tue) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link] (3 responses)

I've been using Totem on openSUSE for several releases; ever since 10.2 it has worked *perfectly*, both as a browser plugin and a stand-alone app. Totem represents a great step forward for multimedia viewing on the LINUX desktop. It is a big improvement in the UI and simplicity over previous tools like mplayer.

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 9, 2008 12:41 UTC (Tue) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link] (2 responses)

Funny, one of the reasons I really dislike Totem is its UI. Since I have it used by default for nothing (intentionally - there seems to be a conspiracy that makes firefox pop it up and not work for various odd things from time to time), the thing that comes to mind is that it insists on wasting about an acre of screen space on a video window even when playing audio. Reminds me of that awful Windows Media thingie. :-(

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 9, 2008 17:41 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

If you want to switch all your defaults to something other then totem then it's pretty much doable due to the .desktop freedesktop.org specification.

files like totem.desktop describe details on how to display items in menus and the syntax for executing files and whatnot. Most applications should now have a *.desktop file associated with them. If there isn't then you can write your own pretty easily, and you get them generated when you do things like specify a custom command in nautilus preferences for a file type.

The mappings from mime-type to application, and custom *.desktop files are then stored in your ~/.local/share/applications/ directory. The defaults.list file is what actually does the file association mapping.

So if you do a 'locate defaults.list' there are usually a few floating around your system. In Debian, I know, there are KDE specific ones and Gnome specific ones.

If you want to then pretty much wipe out the preference for totem in your gnome desktop then you can copy the prefered defaults.list to ~/.local/share/applications/ and then use a text editor to change all the file associations from totem to vlc or whatever you prefer.

Like:
cp /usr/local/share/applications/defaults.list ~/.local/share/applications/
cd ~/.local/share/applications/
vi defaults.list
: % s/totem/vlc/g
:wq

Then that's it. Totem has been banished. Then that file will be updated when you specific a default association in nautilus or whatever.

If Firefox doesn't honor that, then firefox sucks. Try Epiphany. :)

(well for Fedora it would be livna-vlc, but you get the idea)

Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Dec 11, 2008 10:44 UTC (Thu) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link]

Well, it's a movie player, not a media player. The interface was thought of so that it works nicely when playing movies. And you can always resize or minimise it...