Multimedia Hell :-/

Vincent Trouilliez vincent.trouilliez at modulonet.fr
Sun Feb 27 02:43:50 UTC 2005


<Rant mode ON>

Okay, I have been using Wart since the day it was released. So happy
with it but oh my god, could they pleaaaaaase make multimedia "just
work".
All I heared so far is that some formats are proprietary, so they can't
put it in main or restricted, because Ubuntu is free.
But, there are millions of programs in Universe, we people are supposed
to check by themselves if they are allowed or not to use the programs.

So, please, Ubuntu my love, put together whatever packages it takes to
have a fully working audio/video desktop, put it in universe so that you
don't run into legal problems, and we can just click on it to install it
and be done ! :o(

I did the usual, installed 'sox' to get sound preview in Nautilus,
result : no OGG preview, only mp3 and wav.
I removed Totem-Gstreamer, which was not capable of reading anything at
all, and replaced it with Totem-xine. Much better, but still having huge
problems with many WMV files, even with the win32codec
And 3 days ago, since I recently got broadband and wanted to play a bit
with P2P, I downloaded dozens of videos of all kinds and all formats.
Result (I kid you not), only about 5% of them can be read about right.
All the others either have massive playback problems, or won't even
start at all. And I am not talking only about weird Windows files...
EVEN good old MPEG videos cause problems !!!

Pffff.... :-/

I gather that mplayer "can read about anything that exists on earth".
Great, but the procedure to install it is hardly trivial, I looked at it
once in the wiki, and had to give up long before reaching the end of the
procedure, gurus only, along with plenty of time and prayers. Why don't
we have one big package with mplayer (or Totem or whatever) and all
necessary plug-ins, that we can just install from synaptic as soon as we
install Ubtun, and be done with multimedia for good ?

If someone has succefussly compiled mplayer on Warty, could you roll a
deb package and put it in some public place please ? 
And why should we have to sue mplayer, it's hardly a Gnome program.
Totem is there, and supposed to do the job. Gstreamer I thought was the
enw super dupper multimedia frame work for Gnome, with loads of plug-ins
to handle everything, so Totem Gstreamer should be wonderful.... why is
it not this way at all ? When can we expect Gstreamer libraries to
work ?

Sorry, had to vent a bit... would so much Ubuntu to be perfect :-/

<Rant mode OFF>


Vince, wishing he had a magic stick to get Gstreamer to work.





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