Totem Gains New Features For GNOME 3.0

The first development milestone for GNOME 3.0 is expected to be reached tomorrow with the release of the unstable GNOME 2.31.1 package set. While Zeitgeist, the GNOME Shell, and Mutter are among the most talked about changes for the GNOME 3.0 desktop, many mature packages are receiving new features and work too. GNOME's Movie Player, Totem, is one of these packages receiving some attention.

Two of the particularly interesting features for the Totem Movie Player in GNOME 3.0 is video de-interlacing support and a-synchronous loading of play-lists. De-interlacing support has been in the GNOME BugZilla since mid-2009 (Bug #547603), but with the 2.32/3.0 release it's finally being achieved. De-interlacing support was added to Totem's play-sink last week in their Git code-base, but is currently disabled by default unless passing Totem the de-interlace build flag.

The other highlight with the newest Totem code at this time is the a-synchronous loading of play-lists in the GNOME Movie Player so that the user-interface will not freeze when loading large play-lists. This is covered in Bug #559628.

Other items being worked on for GNOME 3.0 include migrating GConf to using GSettings and dconf and then hopefully new themes/icons, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) support in the Evince Document Viewer, web-camera support in GNOME Media, and other items mentioned on the GNOME road-map that would be ideal to land for GNOME 3.0. The first GNOME 3.0 development release is expected to be out tomorrow followed by a number of other development builds before the final release comes in September.