Totem's Full-screen quality in Feisty; is it only me having problem?

[Daniel Robitaille]

On 2/5/07, Michael R. Head <burner at suppressingfire.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-02-03 at 00:20 -0800, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> > Before  I file a bug report, has anyone else noticed a decrease in
> > image quality when running Totem in full screen mode in Feisty?
> >
> > The closest bug report I found was:
> > https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/totem/+bug/82361
>
> This bug might be it:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/totem/+bug/80820
>

Thanks Michael for that link.  I think the answer/problem is that one.
 I had done more tests last night, and I had reached the conclusion
that the problem is related to xv versus xshm.  By default totem uses
xv, and the image quality is lower; and it doesn't matter if the
gstreamer or xine backend is used.  By default gxine uses xshm, and it
looks a lot better on my screen, no matter what is the screen size or
if it'ss full screen.

If you you in ~/.gxine/config, you can force gxine to use xv instead
of xshm, then you get the similar bad video quality in both gxine and
totem.

I would have expected gstreamer-property to be able to allow me to
force totem into using xshm, but it doesn't seem to work for me.

So for now I'm using gxine exclusively to watch videos until I find a
workaround.

By the way there is a downside in using xshm instead of xv:  when in
compiz you don't get any fancy transparency  effect when using xshm
for your vide player:  so a movie playing in gxine disappear when
playing behind a transparent window; the same movie playing in totem
will still be visible behind that transparent window.

It's the same reason when in my original email I was saying that I
couldn't take a snapshot of both gxine and totem at the same time:
it's related to that xv vs xshm difference between the two
applications.


-- 
Daniel Robitaille