GStreamer 0.10.0 is out!

Rhythmbox Gstreamer has been working very well for me for a long time now. Last time I had problems was around gst 0.6 or possibly even earlier. Unfortunately I've seen the same problems as you with totem. It's MUCH better than it used to be, but still not up to par with totem-xine.

In my experience, totem-gstreamer playback is quite choppy. I've experienced syncrhonization issues, files that just straight up don't play, and ENDLESS headaches with dvd playback.

With each and every new Gnome release, one of my first orders of business is to install everything to do with gstreamer and check out totem-gstreamer. Every time it's a little closer, but I always end up reverting to totem-xine with the mplayer essential codec pack.

Maybe this release will fix my issues. I'm certainly hopeful.

It works, for me. For some reason I can't get Totem to work, it crashes on every single video I throw at it, but Rhythmbox on the other hand works like a charm. Actually, I can't even remember when Rhythmbox didn't work. And most likely Totem doesn't work because I have somehow b0rked it. I don't have nor know of any other programs which use GStreamer, so I can't tell anything more. But all in all, GStreamer is actually a good and working idea, and it does work. Maybe it's just your distro which packages it incorrectly? I use Gentoo.

Though, I agree that mplayer rocks. Although it looks bad and doesn't fit at all with the rest of my desktop, I still prefer it over Totem. Oh, and I don't like Totem's UI either.

-WareKala

The new branch of totem for gstreamer 0.10 isn't finished yet and won't be released until the next major GNOME release.

Just to make sure there's no confusion with the branches: in totem CVS there exists a separate CVS branch for GStreamer 0.9. That branch is dead though and has been for some time.

The GStreamer 0.10 backend for totem is developed in CVS HEAD, and you have to pass --enable-gstreamer=0.10 to configure to enable it (otherwise it defaults to xine or GStreamer 0.8).

I'm not sure what problems you've been having but I have to say that my experience with GStreamer on both FC3 and FC4 have been quite different. Most all of my media apps are GStreamer based (Totem, Rhythmbox and Muine) and they've been rock solid for me, particularly since the upgrade to FC4. I've had a few problems with Totem not being able to play everything so I have had to use mplayer on some things but other than that, minimal problem. Maybe there is a problem in your installation? Perhaps some corrupted files or mixed up versions or something like that.

Well my problem is like this:
1. Install gstreamer-mp3
2. Start Rhythmbox
3. Open MP3
4. Freeze or crash
I can reproduce this every single time. And this is on a newly-installed Fedora 4 system.

For a long time, I've said that I'm always interested in backtraces of hangs and crashes. If they contain debug symbols (http://live.gnome.org/GettingTraces), I'll fix the bug as soon as I can find out what's wrong.

Most people I talk with say it works for them. If they say it doesn't, I do the above trick, fix the bug and it suddenly works for them... I use FC4, also.

Dude, I think you're totally missing the point on the DRM.

It seems to me that they're saying "The reason that Apple/Real/Etc don't have music stores on Linux is because they can't use their DRM." The world isn't as simple as DRM vs no DRM. For high quality content providers it's DRM vs no content.

As for the stability of the GStreamer framework, here's the history according to my life on Gentoo:
0.6: Video = crap; Audio = okay, sometimes
0.8: Video = okay, sometimes, just don't use esdsink; Audio = just works
0.10: Better? We shall see.

It seems that on certain distributions GStreamer doesn't work and on other distributions it does. Perhaps this is not so much a problem with GStreamer and more a problem with the people who bundle it. Just a thought.

Exactly my experience with the latest Ubuntu. Let's hope the new version addresses this problem, I regularly follow gstreamer's progresses on planet.gnome and would like it to succeed.

rehdon

Yeah, you're right, GStreamer 0.8 wasn't too great as a one-and-only framework for video playback, but after 18 months of work, GStreamer 0.10 is a _lot_ better. And I mean a _lot_.

What about codecs?
Have they been updated also? I think that for each second of the media files I've got, totem (gst0.8) can't play them.

What media files can't you play? For me, the one thing that isn't a problem in gstreamer is the support for different codecs it seems to have more than anyone else. You probably just don't have the plugins installed.

We have very good Real demuxer in GStreamer 0.10. Only decoder available currently is the ffmpeg one, so newest Real codecs not supported, but we hope to solve that soon.

I believe that is a goal for GStreamer 1.0, the probably next stable release.

This would be really nice - I simply assumed the next version would be 0.12 :-)

The original roadmap had 1.0 right after 0.9, but they decided that it was better to have yet another stable release before 1.0. And they did great, IMHO.

I want to know why we cant have windows media plugins that support non-DRM content? Or is non-DRM content DRM'ed with no restrictions?

gst-ffmpeg supports non-DRM windows media codecs. Fluendo's initial Windows Media plugins will also only support non-DRM Windows media files. Subsequent releases will support both non-DRM Windows Media files and DRM Windows media files.

you don't what what yer talking about. they are releasing commercial licensed codecs.

Nothing wrong with being against DRM. But your comment reeks of not really understanding how the prominent DRM systems actually work.