Totem May Handle Video Acceleration Better With GStreamer VA-API 0.7

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Totem May Handle Video Acceleration Better With GStreamer VA-API 0.7

If you are a user of GNOME's Totem video player, it looks like video hardware acceleration via the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) is working out better for users if using the new GStreamer-VAAPI v0.7 release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Totem-HW-Accel-GST-VA-API

[rabcor]

You're telling me someone actually uses that?

[utack]

On my machine it was trying to use vaapi where none was configured.
Result: Totem did not play anything, Firefox Videos were black
Should be fixed with some minor release, but it was a bit annoying at first.

[Modu]

I don't get devs adding new features to a software that is completely unusable: I haven't been able use gstreamer-vaapi with Totem to play videos since it was introduced. Tirelessly, I repeated install/uninstall cycle with every single Totem/gstreamer-vaapi release without any succes (on Arch Linux).

[bkor]

Great news and Phoronix reaction: complaints and negativity

[Gusar]

Great news and Phoronix reaction: complaints and negativity

I've been seeing reports about issues with gstreamer-vaapi, not just on phoronix and not just about firefox, for months now. So in this particular case, it seems that the attitude has a solid foundation behind it.

If you want to use vaapi, use mpv or kodi - they are, from what I've been seeing, the only ones with a working vaapi implementation. If you want to use vdpau, gstreamer is completely out of the question (there's a vdpau plugin in gst-plugins-bad, but only mpeg2 decoding was ported from gstreamer-0.8 to 1.0 and beyond, who knows if even that is still working). Basically, hardware decoding and gstreamer are a big no-no.

[SystemCrasher]

For me Totem proven to be rather unique, ahem, something: it lacks any meaningful settings so I can't use it in anyhow comfortable way. Yet it managed to expose plenty of annoying bugs, like crashing on some files, being slow to draw video ... without any meaningful way to fix it (there seems to be no option to try different video output method?!). Surely, Totem does not serves as example of good media player for me. It just fails to work reasonably with no ways to do something about it. FAIL, FAIL, FAIL. Maybe it explans negativity about this piece of ... uhm, software. I'm yet to see worse media player. Maybe Windows Media player would be a right "competitor" in awful players top chart, because it behaves like this and also haves slower startup times, so it seems you can make player even worse than Totem, but you have to try really hard :P.

[arokh]

I don't get devs adding new features to a software that is completely unusable: I haven't been able use gstreamer-vaapi with Totem to play videos since it was introduced. Tirelessly, I repeated install/uninstall cycle with every single Totem/gstreamer-vaapi release without any succes (on Arch Linux).

Totem works great here, both with and without gstreamer-vaapi (Arch Linux), don't really get the complaints.