MPEG-4 Movies

[ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY]

On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 09:16 -0300, Celson Aquino wrote:
> But when I try (in my TEST ubuntu partition) to do an "apt-get install
> totem-xine" it says it will uninstall totem-gstreamer.
> 
> I feel bad in remove the ubuntu default that is totem-gstreamer
> because I dont understand so much about this and I dont know if it
> will bring me problems in the future.
> 
> Someone can tell me something about this?
> 
> -- 
> Celson Aquino
> http://braziliancoder.multiply.com
> 
Totem is a just front-end, meaning that it can use on of two back-ends:
either Xine¹ or GStreamer².  GStreamer is a Free (as in open speech),
free (as in cheap), and multi-platform framework for multimedia
applications (somewhat like Apple Quicktime™ and Microsoft DirectShow™).

>From a technical point of view, "totem-gstreamer" is way advanced than
"totem-xine".  However, since GStreamer is still not mature enough, it
has it's drawbacks.  Some of these is the shortage of supported CoDec(s)
(Coding/Decoding of Audio and/or Video streams found in media files) and
containers (file formats and network protocols).  Currently, Xine and
MPlayer³ are much mature (and older) than GStreamer.

If you installed "totem-xine" which will force you to remove
"totem-gstreamer", you only will lose, will, Totem with the GStreamer
back-end.  In any case GStreamer is still installed on your system (as a
matter of fact, GStreamer is used by a lot of other applications like
Rhythmbox "Music Player", Sound Juicer, Sound Recorder and probably a
lot other).

Hopefully, GStreamer will mature enough to go head-to-head (and even
better) with Quicktime and DirectShow.

I hope this clears things for you, and sorry for this lengthy message.
Ziyad.

Footnotes:
     1. http://xinehq.de
     2. http://gstreamer.net
     3. http://mplayerhq.hu