Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera

This is the second in a series of of interviews about Linux Multimedia. The previous interview was with Laszlo Pandy about Jokosher. This time we check in with Bastien Nocera of the Totem media player. In addition to Totem Bastien has worked on range of multimedia related projects and is someone who knows the challenges of multimedia from a range of different angles. In this interview we talk about his work on Totem and the other major contributions he has done to free software multimedia and where he sees things heading from here.

Thanks for taking the time to do this interview Bastien. You have been working on various multimedia
related projects for quite some time now. Could you give us an introduction
on who you are and what projects who been working on over the years?

I'm a "frockney" (Ed Note: French Cockney) currently working at Red Hat. I've been involved in and around GNOME since 1999/2000, and contributed my first new application in 2000, Walk500, a Rio500 management application.

I've started Rhythmbox around that time (although of the original version, only the name now remains), and started Totem in 2002, shortly before joining Red Hat.

Like the 6-year-old application that it is, it probably needs some internal cleaning up to squash some of the long-standing annoyances.

In 2.24, the major new feature was better DVB (digital TV) support. We hope to build on that in the future.

For 2.26, we're hoping to have some new plugins integrated, from 3-rd party developers, like a Jamendo plugin, subtitles downloading through OpenSubtitles, and UPNP/DLNA support through the Coherence Python framework.

It will also be time to integrate the awesome work on DVD playback being done in GStreamer by Jan Schmidt, and start using some newer GStreamer features like playbin2 in the backend.

The obvious one is that it's a newer codebase, which fixes a number of known problems with the old plugin. This means we'll be able to remove work-arounds from our code.

Another enhancement is the better buffering, which should allow YouTube style buffering for slower links, and seeking back within a stream (say you missed the beginning of it)

We would also be getting gapless playback, which would help with the perceived performance.

There are some pretty interesting Totem plugins available like the Gromit annotation plugin, what are the most interesting ones in your opinion and which plugins do you use yourself?

We have a few plug-ins people might not know about. There's a search plugin that uses Tracker, a Galago plug-in to mark yourself as away in your instant messenging client when playing a movie, and a MythTV plugin
to watch recordings or live TV.

We should soon add the much talked about BBC plugin to the development version, as well as a UPNP plugin.

I recently committed a Jamendo plug-in by David Jean Louis, and we have some people working on a plugin to look to look for text subtitles for downloaded movie files. Somebody else is working on a plug-in to use the
notification area.

The only plug-in I use day-to-day is the YouTube plugin, but I could see myself using other plug-ins that might offer new media sources, such as movie trailers, or Vodcasts. It would also be nice to show additional
information about the played media, such as showing Copyright information (including Creative Commons tags) or cover art/film information through IMDB.

We have three main contributors, Philip Withnall, who started out as a bug triager on Totem, and graduated from that to become a full-fledged contributor. Apart from general bug fixing, he's worked on the Python plug-in support, and the YouTube plugin.

Tim-Philip Müller has been the GStreamer go-to guy for Totem for a long while. Apart from the impressive bug fixing, he's brought us the functionality that allows distributions to install missing codecs and plugins on-the-fly. This is something that we do much better than other OSes and desktops and it's helped multimedia applications users feel we were closer to "just works".

The third major contributor is Christian Persch, the only person that knows all the magic that happens in the browser plugin, and the number one "huge patch contributor".

The first thing, and that's not as ludicrous as it first sounds, is that GStreamer has a good bug tracker. It uses the GNOME Bugzilla, just like Totem, and it allows us to communicate better between framework and
applications developers.

Through the increase of the number of contributors, GStreamer has seen more bugs getting fixed, more features being added, and some long-standing problems being fixed. DVD playback (with menus!) is
already possible (it helps if you want to play a "Red Dwarf" DVD). These days the main development focus for the GStreamer team isn't so much on GStreamer itself, but on the applications using it, and using it to its full potential and that is a major win for those of us developing applications.

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".

A lot of the problems multimedia on Linux encountered all those years ago are gone, and we're seeing a shift in the goals. Most video and audio files can be played, indexed and shared. The goal posts have moved, and now people are more interested in content creation, as can be seen in applications like Pitivi or Cheese, or to a lesser extent, on music management programs like Rhythmbox that need to transcode files for specific devices.

My personal main focus will most likely be on better integration with portable devices, where you'll run into another problem field, the synchronization of data between computer, device, and Internet services.
Think serving audio to your Bluetooth speakers, listening to music on your phone, or watching films on your portable console.

I think this question is slightly flawed, and it's not really your fault, but a rather widespread misconception. Let me take another example: does USB work? yes, does my funky USB gadget have all of its
features working? maybe, maybe not.

All the basics work, but there's still plenty to do, such as better integration for GPS devices, integration with NetworkManager, plenty of bug fixing on the headset and headphones code in PulseAudio, and the likes.

The nice side of it is that we have solid foundations for all that to happen these days, and the work can be done piecemeal.

Yes. Fluendo got the ball rolling by getting gnome-lirc-properties out there. It wasn't quite as finished as it might have been, and it certainly wasn't working under Fedora. But with the work I have been doing, if you have an infra-red remote control, you should definitely try the clickey-clickey approach.

That sounds like a very self-interested question, Christian. Do you happen to own one?

It should work, although some patches I think are necessary are still pending in lirc. It did work in my limited testing.

Fedora is pretty much leading the way in making the sound side of things not suck (we also hired an ALSA developer). The main problem for Fedora, and a lot of other distribution is software patents. We can't have out-of-the-box unencrypted DVD playback, or MP3 encoding or decoding, or even watch TV! It's unfortunately not something I can see changing in miraculous ways over the coming years.

On top of my list of nice things would be XvMC support across the board, and MPEG-4/VC-1 support for it in cards that support it. Video cards have had the ability to accelerate video decoding for nearly 10 years,
but we're still not utilising all the features of those cards nowadays.

This would mean HD video playback on even the less powerful machines (as long as the video card can sustain it), and maybe even moving some of the software patents problems into the hardware itself.

The other wishlist item is having an AMR decoder integrated in ffmpeg, so 3GPP video files phones capture can have sound.

Apart from the stalwarts of GNOME multimedia (Totem, Rhythmbox, sound-juicer and Cheese), I also use avidemux and easytag. Most of the other applications are usually there only for debugging purposes.

I would also recommend using YouTube through Totem's own plug-in, and last.fm (and don't forget to add yourself to the GNOME group!).

To learn more about Totem visit projects.gnome.org/totem.
Interview done by Christian F.K. Schaller.