Announcement

**ad_267** · 04 May 2010, 06:08 PM

Deinterlacing, asynchronous, playlist, codebase/code base, webcam/web camera.

There's no need to try and put a hyphen in everything.

**monraaf** · 04 May 2010, 06:25 PM

Totem is fine for simple video playback (as long as you don't use it in combination with fglrx) Personally I would like to see a good video application for GNOME that can also manage your video collection with tagging and stuff. Just as we have for photos and music. This whole concept of browsing your file system for videos seems a bit outdated to me.

**Remco** · 04 May 2010, 07:54 PM

Originally posted by val-gaav View Post

You just named one of the things yourself (BTW this is a must and both VLC and Smplayer have this)

The reason it's not a must is because you can (and should) fix the files permanently. I just want to write a plugin that does that while playing. It's hardly a fundamental feature.

I could name several other key features like ASS/SSA support but I don't want to waste my time and check what current Totem has and what it has not.

I don't know whether it supports that particular type of subtitle, but if it doesn't it should. But that's just making the video playback feature-complete. It would basically be missing support for a codec.

I know what it didn't have in a brief moment I've tried it, some time ago. I highly doubt the current totem got any better. Considering the GNOME mentality it really is enough for a player to just play files pause and maybe have a fullscreen mode ...

Play/pause, scrub, fullscreen, playlist is all I ask of the interface. I don't want to be able to modify the video in all sorts of ways, making it blurry, wobbly, mirrored, black and white, add noise, split it up, resize, crop, 10 different deinterlacers... it's the featuritis that make Mplayer and VLC look completely cluttered. They have 1000s of features, but basic fullscreen functionality is unreliable.

**liam** · 04 May 2010, 10:09 PM

There is Banshee, but...

Originally posted by monraaf View Post

Totem is fine for simple video playback (as long as you don't use it in combination with fglrx) Personally I would like to see a good video application for GNOME that can also manage your video collection with tagging and stuff. Just as we have for photos and music. This whole concept of browsing your file system for videos seems a bit outdated to me.

...I'm not a big fan of MONO apps (I find them slow, buggy, and memory intensive).
What I would like, in my ideal Gnome3 desktop, are some add-on miners for Tracker that would look at media titles/metadata and search the web (like MusicBrainz) and then enter in the complete metadata for me. Since Tracker is back in Gnome's good graces I hope this will be possible soon b/c, IMHO, one of the killer ideas behind Gnome 3 is getting rid of/minimizing the amount of browsing one has to do.

**monraaf** · 05 May 2010, 01:27 AM

Originally posted by liam View Post

...I'm not a big fan of MONO apps (I find them slow, buggy, and memory intensive).

Yeah, me neither.

What I would like, in my ideal Gnome3 desktop, are some add-on miners for Tracker that would look at media titles/metadata and search the web (like MusicBrainz) and then enter in the complete metadata for me. Since Tracker is back in Gnome's good graces I hope this will be possible soon b/c, IMHO, one of the killer ideas behind Gnome 3 is getting rid of/minimizing the amount of browsing one has to do.

I tend to prefer using apps that are specialized for specific tasks. Don't know about a generic desktop meta-data service. There's an old saying "Jack of all trades, master of none". So I'm a bit skeptical about Gnome 3. But who knows. I guess I'll have to wait and see.

**liam** · 05 May 2010, 02:08 AM

Sure. I can understand that.

Originally posted by monraaf View Post

I tend to prefer using apps that are specialized for specific tasks. Don't know about a generic desktop meta-data service. There's an old saying "Jack of all trades, master of none". So I'm a bit skeptical about Gnome 3. But who knows. I guess I'll have to wait and see.

You also know what they say, "Just because it is a saying..."

I really love the idea of Tracker, and the latest stable isn't bad (though when I first tested it I had huge problems with tracker-store just Hoovering ram), so that is the solution to many problems with the Linux, or at least the Gnome, desktop. A central data store for all non-configuration data. The indexing is, for me, a nice bonus. Having one thing do this means more developers can focus on one codebase and more testers. That, and I also love the idea of simply copying my tracker-db over to a new system and having all the media applications know my interests.

I've been using GS on and off for many months and it has made great progress (stability-wise), but I feel like they've forgotten some of the other mandates that they themselves put forward for Gnome 3 (like an adaptive interface). I'm waiting for st to mature a bit more before I dig into it, and I don't understand why their using a separate flash-derived library for tweening rather than Clutter/clutter-based.

**beniwtv** · 05 May 2010, 03:40 AM

Originally posted by Remco View Post

Well, there is one thing, but nothing fundamental. What I would like to see is a way to change the delay of the audio, so I can fix files that are out of sync.

[rant mode (not related to your post!)]
The reason this hasn't been implemented because it's very very bad. Having the audio out of sync is because the "person" who made the video doesn't know how to encode properly.

We already have enough "quirks" in our video players for virtually any format just because some random file wasn't encoded properly and needs it. The sad thing is, the files then start spreading because some random "awezzome video encoderzzzz FREE FREE FREE" application thinks it can encode video without the user knowing how to do it. It's worse than web standards.

I mean seriously, people should just learn how to encode video files properly. A video player shouldn't have to 'fix' their mess.
[/rant mode]

On a side note, I agree with you that Totem is all I need for viewing a view videos. I don't download illegal videos, so the audio being out of sync is very rare.

**miles** · 05 May 2010, 11:47 AM

Originally posted by beniwtv View Post

[rant mode (not related to your post!)]
(...)

I mean seriously, people should just learn how to encode video files properly. A video player shouldn't have to 'fix' their mess.
[/rant mode]

On a side note, I agree with you that Totem is all I need for viewing a view videos. I don't download illegal videos, so the audio being out of sync is very rare.

The person viewing is rarely the person that encoded the file, so I don't understand what your point was about people needing to learn how to encode properly (if there ever was one). Unless you're saying Totem is a video encoder, which I doubt.

As for viewing legal videos:
1. there's always good movies released on DVD and Bluray by Big Content where the audio stream isn't perfectly synced with the video stream - a good video player can fix that;
2. different monitors have different output lag, up to 1/5th of a second. One second is a really long time actually, you can fit a decent sentence into one or two seconds, so 1/5th is quite noticeable if you look at the person speaking. Worse for short duration sounds when you see the act on screen (door closing, steps...);
3. there's plenty of small content producers out there that don't provide as technically good content as big media. It doesn't make their work less worth watching;
4. "legal" isn't just DVD+Bluray, there's also TV and (legal) streaming, both sometimes have their flaws.

Saying one shouldn't watch contents where the audio is slightly out of sync isn't just silly, it's like a new form of censure. In the name of what, a blindly ignorant developer?

**beniwtv** · 05 May 2010, 01:06 PM