Totem in Fedora
Yes, we’re in! I was happy to see Totem (based on a GStreamer backend) becoming a part of Fedora Core 3. I was even happier to see that people generally seem to like it. That, of course, doesn’t mean that we’re done now. Quite the contrary: now the play only *starts* to shift to second gear. I hope I’ll be able to keep up with it.

That brings us to the next gear-shifter. Yeah, say after me: I want Totem in the standard GNOME desktop! We’re ready for it. Now, surely this isn’t up to me since A) I’m biased and B) I’m not the Totem maintainer. But I can always lead the Totem-in-GNOME PR campaign. Let’s bring it on! Bastien said he’d look at the whole thing after Fedora Core 3 is released. What do other people think?

I’ve been fixing a lot of Ogg-related issues in playback for the past few days, and current CVS seems to be quite forgiving for most of the movies and music files out there. It’s not there yet, but I have a pretty good clue of the missing bits’n’pieces, also for other (annoying) bugs. Good feeling. It’s just a huge todo list, basically:

• playbin (our playback backend) needs to support subsequent (chained) tracks in files, e.g. for chained ogg. It will currently just play the first. Related: do you show length per track? Total length of all tracks together? How? this is important for both Ogg and DVD.
• playbin currently doesn’t forward all init errors, e.g. “soundcard is busy” or “soundcard does not exist”. Instead, it just says “could not open” which isn’t really helpful.
• inside GStreamer and playbin, we should make errors more userfriendly. “Don’t know how to handle $mimetype” isn’t really useful if it really just means “the file you loaded has media type $media_type, but you don’t have plugins for that. Please install them.” because you’re loading a mp3 and fedora doesn’t support that by default.

But we’ll get there… :)..