Miguel, you’re not installing 160 MB GStreamer (source! That’s only a few MB binary - nice trick ) for playing MP3s. Or did you think Microsoft DirectShow only plays WMA audio? :).

GStreamer
How cool will 0.8.0 be! :). Honestly, it’ll rock. I’ve been testing Totem over and over again for the past few weeks. I can playback a large amount of movies, pretty much anything on my harddisk. I *am* still having issues, but for all, the problem is known, so it should be fixable easily:

• One MPEG-4 video/audio Quicktime file doesn’t decode correctly. That’s because we don’t initialize the extradata member in AVCodecContext using the ‘esds’ atom contents in the Quicktime file. Same for MPEG-4 AAC audio, but there, it’s not required.
• The Quicktime demuxer currently has some issues with raw PCM or MACE audio. the problem lies in the demuxer, not a decoder or setup or anything. Will probably be a minor quick fix.
• Some MPEGs with highly unsynchronized elemtary streams will ‘lock’ our internal clocking (video far ahead of audio, but no fresh audio data). The correct fix is probably to make the amount of buffered data somewhat larger for output queue elements, say from 1 second to 5 seconds (those are limits).

Apart from that, I can playback most MPEG files, all other Quicktime files and with no single problem all AVI, ASF and MKV files. Please add bugzilla entries (GNOME bugzilla, product ‘GStreamer’) for every single “common media file” (so don’t bother adding WMV9 movies ) that doesn’t playback using Totem-GStreamer using current CVS of both. Maybe I’ll push some more and try to get GStreamer 0.8.1 out of the door for GNOME-2.6.0, with each of those fixed. That would rock! I didn’t test Rhythmbox as extensively, but I know that I can playback MPEG-4 AAC, Ogg/Vorbis, MP3 with no problems. That’s about 100% fo my collection. I don’t use WMA (which should work), WAV (blah) or FLAC… I have some test files for each, though. I need more video test files.

GNOME
I’m - as of today - a happy member of the GNOME foundation! Yay! GNOME, luv ya!

U.S.A.
Did I mention how much I love the U.S.A., or more specifically Manhattan, so far? It’s so clean, it’s so controlled, it’s so… Special! I simply love this place. Cornell University is a wonderful place to be at, too. Awesome!

ALSA support in GNOME Volume Control: yes, it’s there! I finally pushed myself into installing the ultimate evil onto my computer ([*] yes, that’s ALSA), and (helped by Jan Schmidt) added some related stuff to the ALSA plugin to get GNOME Volume Control to recognize it correctly. Now everyone can sleep peacefully again, gone’s all regressions.

Did I mention that it looks horrible? See screenshot. Ohwell, we’re in UI freeze, I’ll rewrite the GNOME Volume Control in GNOME-2.8. :).

[*] ALSA’s indeed the ultimate evil [**].
- it hides POSIX using something hideous called alsalib.
- it actually forces the use of this hideous thing by not documenting it’s kernel API and putting kernel driver bug workarounds into alsalib.
- it does assert()s on errors (how about nicely reporting an error back to the application so it can notify the user? How about standard errno? See GNOME bugzilla #134007).
- It “transparently” does software conversion. This is cool, except that it shouldn’t be the default. Unfortunately, the default device enables software conversion (default = plughw:0), thereby stimulating lousy application development.
- I feel like trolling.

[**] Next to terrorism, of course… See below.

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Serious things: what can I say about Madrid? Nothing, I guess… Can I cry? No; this is beyond anything I can grasp… I’m currently in New York and visited Ground Zero last week. Why do people do this?