Re: GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.0: "Mighty Atom"



On Fri, 2003-04-11 at 16:59, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-04-11 at 14:00, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > On Fri, 2003-04-11 at 09:08, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > > <quote who="Jeff Waugh">
> > > 
> > > > But all of this is what the proposal process is meant to address -> it's
> > > > up to you guys to convince us to include your software.
> > > 
> > > Ahr, this came out wrongly. That's not how it should always work, and
> > > certainly not for every proposed module. Some things are proposed almost by
> > > default - fontilus and nautilus-cd-burner are good examples of these.
> > > They're already regarded as stable, have obvious maintainers, simple goals,
> > > are appropriately aligned with the goals of the desktop release, fill nice
> > > feature gaps that users will like, etc.
> > 
> > I feel cheated. Nobody said anything against adding Totem to the desktop
> > release, and it has all the properties enounced above. Why is it not
> > getting in the desktop release ?
> 
> If nobody said anything before against adding Totem to the desktop
> release before then let me do so now (sorry Bastien). 
> 
> I think that adding a media player to the desktop release that do not
> use the standard media backend and do not use the standard gconf keys

Doesn't use the "standard media backend", I agree. Doesn't use the
standard gconf keys, no, there's no need for them, they're autodetected,
it works out of the box on most machines. (The audio output can be
configured via gconf for my very own testing purposes, it's not
configurable in the UI). In fact, needing to have gconf keys seems to me
like it's a "flaw" in design more than anything else.

> defined for audio and video ouput and which contains functionality
> already bundled with nautilus-media would be a mistake.

Apart from the thumbnailer, nautilus-media and Totem don't have anything
in common.

> The GNOME 2.x series is supposed to be about creating an integrated
> desktop where the 1.x series to often had the feel of a meta project for
> separate projects and adding Totem would be a typical GNOME 1.x kinda of
> addtion due to reasons mentioned in the first paragraph. 

Totem currently is the only movie player that's close to be integrated
to the desktop. What exactly would be missing for it to be integrated?

> I think if that if we really want to be shipping an official media
> player for 2.4 then gst-player is a better candidate at this point in
> time. The only real strenght Totem/Xine has in the comparison at this

No disrespect to the great deal of work Julien put in gst-player, but I
don't think it's as complete, easy to use, or "just works"-style enough
to be in the desktop release. That's why we are working together to get
a GStreamer back-end to Totem.

> point in time is support for more properietary formats, none of which
> any of our major distributors will probably dare ship anyway, which

If you're talking about the DLLs, yes, it's a problem. For the rest, I
know that Debian ships totem (thanks to Sebastien), Frederic was going
to include Totem in Mandrake cooker, and Matthias is distributing it on
freshrpms.net. (and I just noticed that all these people are French ;)

> makes the point kinda moot, because people who want to view those
> formats would have to download extra packages to do it anyway.

There's much more than the formats it supports. Here it goes:
- it "just works" (audio and video output are autodetected, no need for
configuration, so is the "Optical media drive")
- it supports fast CDDA playback on more than just Linux (see the CDDA
input plugin, it works on BSDs, Solaris and Linux)
- it has an easy-to-use and HIG compliant interface
- the sound output works on BSDs, Linux, Solaris and Irix
- it supports external subtitle files
- it supports LIRC

That's a list of things that Totem supports, and that aren't available
in GStreamer. That doesn't mean that GStreamer isn't a good piece of
software, it's just that for playback software, it's not as powerful as
xine is.

(I hope that people will start using the BaconVideoWidget in their
applications for playback, it would ease the port to GStreamer when it
is done.)

So, in the end, I really think that Totem has its place in the desktop
release, even if it isn't based on GST.

Cheers

-- 
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>

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