[64studio-devel] 'Totem' not playing ANY file here

[Daniel James]

Hi Raphael,

> Totem (or any other 'media'player) doesn't play ANY media file on my PC,
> be it .avi, ogg, mp3 or whatever.

Firstly, Totem doesn't work with Jack, so you have to make sure Jack or 
any other sound application is not running. If that still doesn't work, 
check your user is a member of the audio group (Gnome menu: Desktop -> 
Administration -> Users and Groups).

> Why does it seem so frickin complicated to include some codecs in every
> distro to be able to watch some video files or to listen to some mp3's.

We do have Ogg Vorbis, Theora, FLAC, WAV and MP3 support by default. 
We're working on Flash, using the Gnash player and plugin.

> not being able to watch embedded media while browsing the web
> no .mov support

That's software patents for you :-(  We can't include these proprietary 
codecs in a free distro without the risk of legal action from companies 
with patent claims. End users can download codecs and DVD decoding 
utilities from a number of places, with little apparent risk of 
enforcement action - but then the RIAA did sue individual music lovers 
in the war on P2P, so I would never say it couldn't happen.

> And why is it, when I try to install some other music apps from the
> debian stable repo i.e., 64studio WILL NOT install certain dependencies.
> I guess it's to avoid breaking some substantial functions?

Yes, but this situation will get better after the Debian Etch and 64 
Studio 2.0 releases, because we will then be in sync with a Debian 
stable release for the first time. When we started in 2005, Debian Sarge 
was already too old for us to work with.

> So somebody please help me watching my .avi or .mov files

mplayer will play most video files, but we can't ship the codecs 
packages for it in a free (gratis) product, and last time we checked it 
didn't support gstreamer plugins (including the gstreamer MP3 plugin 
that we licence from Fluendo). So we took the decision to ship 
totem-gstreamer as the default video player.

Cheers!

Daniel