now that the Totem Mozilla plugin is relatively stable, it was time to test and make sure that various often-used media formats play back fine. Playing fine means that all UI components behave consistently (seekbar, video window / seek slider composition, etc.) and do the correct thing when pressed. The result for now is in #326033 (fixes performance issues in Quicktime plugin when used for streams), #326299 (fixes crash in ASF demuxer when used for streams) and #326301 (adds seeking and fixes time slider updating in Mozilla plugin).
Quicktime (and derivatives)
Mostly tested on Apple’s trailers site. With current CVS and patches:
- + Slider updates correctly.
- + Seeking works (!).
– Recent h264 samples do not appear to work. :-(. Other media formats work fine. In short, don’t click the “HD” videos for now. Needs a quick fix.Update: fixed in #326318- – Some pages contain multiple video sources, and only one of them plays, since the others give an annoying error dialog that the video Xv port is already in use (possibly depending on your video card). This should obviously not happen.
- – I’ve encountered one crash (of the whole desktop) when I quickly click some links while Firefox pops up an error dialog while I click on, appears mostly stable otherwise. Possibly a bug in X or firefox itself.
ASF (WMV, WMA)
Tested using some videos from GeenStijl. With current CVS and patches:
- + It plays, with audio/video (including WMV3 if you use PitfDLL)
- – If audio lags in the stream (i.e. starts >3s after video), the first 3 seconds of video will take up to a minute to play, i.e. it looks like it takes very long to get started.
- – Since we operate on stdin here (from Firefox), it is not (yet?) possible to seek in those streams. Unsure if this is fixeable in an easy way.
- – Time slider does not appear to work yet, although this may be related to the next item.
- – Somehow, it stops playing after a few seconds when embedded in a webpage. I can not reproduce that on the commandline yet. May be some odd javascript acting up or something like that. Alternatively, some odd EOS signal is bugging us in the unseekable source after we do type detection. Will need to look closer.
MPEG
I tested MPEG a few months ago and didn’t look back since then. From what I remember:
- + basics work, …
- – … but stuff like seeking is not possible, similar to the story above, and time slider updating doesn’t work yet since we cannot retrieve the length of the sample (file-length). I’ll need to work on a fix here.
I hope to get some of this stuff fixed before GNOME 2.14 is released. If other people are interested in taking up some of those tasks, please go for it, but remember that this takes some basic knowledge of Totem and GStreamer internals. Also, wider testing and new bug reports are always appreciated.