Marcel Janssen wrote:
On Saturday 07 May 2005 11:12, Toralf Lund wrote:Bad choice of words, there. I meant "various distros" as in "Fedora Core and different 3rd-party distributions of packages built specifically for Fedora".
This has probably been discussed before, but is anyone actually using
totem to play DVDs these days? I've tried variants from various distros
and installed every gstreamer plugin I can think of, but it still won't
work. Originally, it wouldn't recognise DVDs at all, of course, now it
will either crash or give messages like
Do you mean you installed binary packages from other distros ? If so -> bad idea to begin with. Crashes will be very likely.
I've tried totem, but I don't understand the UI. Play disc will not play the disc, so to my opinion it fails it's function ;-)Calling that an UI problem is definitely stretching things. When the function associated with an UI item doesn't work, I'd say that the function is faulty, not the UI. But perhaps your remarks wasn't meant too seriously...
Anyhow, Totem or any other media player installed with Fedora Core certainly won't play DVDs out-of-the box. Apparently, Fedora/Red Hat dare not distribute the somewhat controversial code needed to do the job along with the OS...
Those seem to be options I don't need and don't want, and they tend to get in my way when I try to find what I do need...Also, many options that xine-ui has I miss in totem.
xine-ui may not be the nicest UI, but it can do the job which is most important I think.Of course... But when I've tried it, I've been left with the feeling that it didn't get the work done because I had to struggle too much with the GUI - not only because I found it hard to understand, but also because it just wouldn't work some of the time - and the whole application seemed somewhat unstable.
And, no, I don't think I want to use xine or mplayer or whatever
instead. I think they all have pretty lousy UIs, and mplayer in
particular has also proven to be rather unreliable.
About the UI you can do something. There are many frontends to xine like kaffeine or gxine.
Yes. Or I may even use Totem with Xine as a backend...
Suggest using kaffeine
Maybe I'll give it a try...
Worked straight away to play DVD for me and has all the necessary functions for me to support multimedia.I've tried that one, and yes, while it also has some dialogs and menu items that are rather cryptic, the UI is not that bad. However, I'm struggling a bit to get it to play the actual film or display the root menu; it seems inclined to start showing me some of the "special features" or whatever whenever I open a disk.
I know one application that generally just works most of the time, though: It's
Ogle (http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~dvd/) Some of its features are
incomplete, however, and it seems like there hasn't been a lot of
development lately, and I've come across one DVD it won't play, so I
thought I might try something else...
Another application is vlc (http://www.videolan.org/vlc)
If you install any of these, please use yum or apt so that at least you're sure that your not working with broken packages. It really saves you a lot of hassle in the end.
Yes.
Meanwhile, I'm still inclined to conclude that Ogle is still the player closest to Just Working, but unfortunately, it seems like there are too few developers involved in the project. Maybe I'll start a flame war by saying this, but I generally think that it would be a lot more productive if the people behind some of the video players would stop developing their own software, and start contributing to other applications instead. There has probably been far too much duplicate work in this area.
- Toralf
