On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 12:59:52 +1300 Richard Tindall wrote: > You were right Nick. > > Nick Rout wrote: >
> >mplayer tells me that it is using libmpeg2 to decode the file, so gstreamer > >may work if gst-plugins-mpeg2dec is installed. > > > > > I tried putting in several of the available package extras, starting > with that above for libmpeg2 <http://libmpeg2.sourceforge.net>, which > got the picture rolling. It took a while and surprise to find that the > audio stream would not become audible without aRts. I have seen this > program listed a lot - especially around KDE - without knowing what it > was for. > arts is the kde sound daemon. Most modernish sound apps can be switched between outputting direct to alsa, to oss, or via various sound daemons like arts (kde), esd (gnome) and so forth. I guess you needed to configure totem/gstreamer to output to something other than arts if you didn't want to install arts. > The point of the exercise is to find out where the most useable given > solutions most readily are. With gstreamer as the backend for Totem - > out of the box - FreeBSD plays the test mpg & Ubuntu doesn't. So you > have been helpful in showing what makes the difference, so that Ubuntu's > gstreamer can be tweaked up to FreeBSD's delivery standard. Before this, > the solution I have found and passed onto others is to install > totem-xine package, which displaces totem-gstreamer. Xine is clearly a > fully-pledged media player, with all the plugins in place (i've not yet > had cause to try media player). xine is a far more mature product than gstreamer IMHO. But in all these matters it is usually a case of choosing the right codecs and packages. It is confused by many packagers not shipping certain codecs and libraries for legal reasons (one of the things i like about gentoo is that they don't ship anything except the instructions on how to compile vartious apps, therefore they don't "ship" mp3 libraries, or libdvdcss, those things are downloaded by the user in accordance with the user's own wishes, conscience and local laws. On other distros you may have to go outside the "official repositories" to get the pre-compiled binary equivalents. rave over, its not a distro war, or is it?) Anyway both xine and mplayer are very mature. i see mplayer won this years "reader's choice awards" at linux journal for "media player" (followed by xine and kaffeine.) Both xine and mplayer will handle a large number of formats and codecs, providing the right formats and codecs are installed and/or they are compiled with the right options. The details are covered very well in both the mplayer docs and the xine docs on their respective websites, but expect some dense reading and a learning curve to match. It took me ages to grok the difference between a format abd a codec, and I am still unclear at times. xine is basically a library (xine-lib) to which you can attach front ends. xine-ui works fine, but totem and kaffeine are alternatives. kaffeine has kde widgets, totem has gnome (or is it gtk) widgets. I have not used gstreamer much, and when i had amarok installed it could use the xine backend but not the gstreamer back end, so i am not sure what it's problem is. As I said i don't believe it to be as mature as the other back ends available. > > The next level of this test is to get both O/Ss to play my LOTR dvd, and > discover if i am Free to so do. Currently both totem-gstreamers do not > comply. (Errors about 'can't read dvd info' and 'can't determine stream > type'.) I'll try more plugins, then probably have to try switching to > xine again. OK well it sounds like you don't have libdvdcss2 installed. This is the software that cracks dvd encryption and extracts the keys so that it can be played. withut decoding the stream is unreadable so that would line up with either of those error messages. For obvious reasons many distros do not want to "ship" libdvdcss, ubuntu included. You have to go elsewhere, google will help you, but I have to say that there are so many ubuntu help sites out there that it is very confusing now. > > Thanks for your input, > No problems. As you may have guessed multimedia on linux is one of my pet subjects. I wouldn't say i am an expert by any means, but i can usually get most media to play, which is more than I can say with windows. Another plug I know, but I can also say that i've only been able to "get most media to play" since I used gentoo. At least on linux I know that if i install codec-foo, I am only going to get codec-foo, and not a whole bunch of spyware, or even worse, the latest MS media player! -- Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
