[Mageia-dev] Video players

[JA Magallón]

On 11/24/2012 01:28 AM, Pierre Jarillon wrote:
> For Mageia 3 it is necessary to read all kinds of videos.
> I have a set of video to test the distro.
>
> Totem is out of service but its is however the defaut reader...
> For some videos, Dragon is not shown in the list of players but works.
> http://vimeo.com/53980967 from vimeo works with Mageia 1 but not in cauldron.
> VLC works always.
>
> My suggestions are:
> - When VLC is loaded, it must become the default video viewer.
> - For each video type, define the viewer (Totem, Dragon) which works.
>

Some points, specially related to Totem that is what I mainly use:

- Totem/GStreamer plays all kind of videos I have given it, mainly
   divx/mp4/h264/mpeg2 with mp3/ac3 audio in avi/mp4/mkv containers.
   It all depends on your gstreamer being correctly installed.

- Videos like http://vimeo.com/53980967 are just FLASH, they do not
   depend on Totem,VLC o Dragon. It works for me in Cauldron, as
   YouTube both in Flash or HTML5 formats.

- Most desktops DEs have a native player (Totem for Gnome, Dragon for
   KDE, Parole for XFCE, ...). That should work and be the default
   out of the box, that is what is most integrated with each DE.
   Suppose that Totem was the absolutely best player regarding
   fomats. What would you think KDE users would say if it was made
   the default for KDE, forcing them to install half Gnome to see
   videos ?

- Many desktops have some kind of 2nd-to-best player. Perhaps VLC
   is a good option for KDE (it is Qt based anyways), but for Gnome
   or XFCE (GTK based) the best next option IMHO is Gnome MPlayer
   (as good as as VLC).

So the only problem with Totem is probably urpmi requires/suggests
missing to guarantee that is plays all audio/video formats, or
at least most used. And I suppose you can have the same problems with
Phonon (or whatever is the KDE equivalent to GStreamer).
And wrt to copyrighted decoders, the problem is the same for all,
you have to use Tainted repos to get a GStreamer/VLC/MPlayer that
decodes them.

If you can post your video test collection somewhere, I can try to
see if totem works for me with them.

-- 
J.A. Magallon <jamagallon()ono!com>        \               Winter is coming...