[Breezy] Totem not playing Audio CDs

[Eamonn Sullivan]

Further on this (sorry for replying to myself), I've gotten audio CDs
and DVDs to open and play fine by changing the applications under
System/Preferences/Removable Drives and Media to gnome-cd for audio
CDs and wxvlc for DVDs. Those options were previously set to totem.

But this has been puzzling me since Warty preview: totem with the
gstreamer backend either doesn't work at all (audio CDs) or works
extremely poorly (DVDs). Playing DVDs, for example, it plays at less
than 10th realtime. I know everyone suggests switching to the Xine
backend, but I like the *idea* of the gstreamer backend, i.e. as an
API, and I just want to understand how something that's considered the
future could work so badly on my (relatively modern) system. I only
built this PC for Warty preview (whenever that was -- I can't remember
the version number, but it was just over a year ago, right?). It uses
an Intel motherboard with on-board Intel Extreme (i810) graphics and
1GB of RAM. My processor is a 2.4Ghz celeron.

What settings should I be playing around with? The
System/Preferences/Multimedia Selector for video is currently set to
XWindows(X11/XShm/Xv), although the test on all options works fine and
doesn't seem to affect Totem playback at all. Presumably
totem-gstreamer works for someone, at least the developers. Does it
require a better graphics card? And, if so, why does VLC not have a
problem?

-Eamonn

On 24/09/05, Eamonn Sullivan <eamonn.sullivan at gmail.com> wrote:
> When I insert an audio CD into my Hitachi GD-2000, the "Audio Disc"
> icon shows up on my desk, Totem opens and I get the following error
> message:
>
> Totem could not play this media (Audio CD) although a plugin is
> present to handle it.
>
> You might want to check that a disc is present in the drive and that
> it is correctly configured.
>
> However, when I open VLC, the audio disc plays fine.
>
> I must be missing a package or something. I can't honestly say whether
> this worked in Hoary because I had never tried it. (I use
> beep-media-player with Internet radio stations, mostly). I only
> noticed this when my teenaged daughter tried to play one of her
> (headache-inducing) goth music CDs.
>
> I've also just discovered that I can't play DVDs like I use to from
> VLC. That I *do* know worked in Hoary because I only used it a few
> weeks ago. Totem (gstreamer) plays DVDs as dreadfully as it always
> has, but VLC doesn't work. I appear to have all of the dvd libraries
> installed (libdvdnav4, libdvdplay0, gstreamer0.8-dvd, libdvdread3 and
> libdvdcss2 generated by the install-css.sh script in libdvdread3).
>
> I wonder if the two problems are related? Any pointers on where to
> check for problems/missing libraries/etc?
>
> -Eamonn
>