Playing DVDs using totem?

[Toralf Lund]

Marcel Janssen wrote:

>On Saturday 07 May 2005 11:12, Toralf Lund wrote:
>  
>
>>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.
>  
>
Bad choice of words, there. I meant "various distros" as in "Fedora Core 
and different 3rd-party distributions of packages built specifically for 
Fedora".

>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...

>Also, many options that xine-ui has I miss in totem.
>
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...

> 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 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)
>  
>
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.

>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