Douglas Royds wrote: > Thanks for the urpmi pointers, people, but if you read my "Including > kernel headers..." thread you will see that I don't yet have a > functional modem on the laptop in question. Once I do, then I assume > that urpmi will be great. In the meantime I download stuff at work (my > Linux installation is kindly sponsored by Tait, unbeknown to them), and > cart it home on a USB flash drive. This reminds me that I must take up > an offer that I received of a PCMCIA modem in the meantime. > > Donning my fire-proof suit - In what way is mplayer superior to Totem? Totem is a front end for xine so it's more accurate to compare xine/libxine to mplayer.
It's quite simply faster and supports alot more codecs. Meaning that it will play just about any media file. Also with the newer version mplayer 1.0pre1-3 it has native support for most codecs no longer needing the win32 codecs. It also when compiled from source comes with mencoder and encoding utility which supports nearly as many formats as the actually player. Also it's seems to more consistently work than xine various files I've tried to play in xine would crash it, hang it or run really slowly while trying to play them with mplayer would work perfectly. Apart from that mplayer's gui (gmplayer) is as far as I'm concerned alot cleaner being gtk based rather than what ever the strange thing xine uses meaning it's alot easier to configure! Also Mplayer tends to have a few more options and supports just about every output method available. Chad
