For hardcore testers
Lately, I’ve been in the lucky position to have several people test CVS of GStreamer and Totem for me regularly and give me feedback on bugs. Because of them, I’ve been able to make Totem’s GStreamer backend improve so much lately. We’re far from finished, but we’re gradually moving on from fixing downright crashers to fixing timing issues and adding user-requested features.

Now, you can help! In this blog, you’ll find this RPM repo which regularly provides new RPMs of the current CVS of GStreamer and Totem for Fedora Core 3. Use at your own risk, and don’t forget to report bugs! Many thanks to Felix for doing this.

For those that want to report bugs, here’s a list of known ones (from the top of my head):

• I’ve recently noticed that our AC-3 decoder doesn’t handle incoming timestamps correctly. The consequence is that if you have an AVI with AC-3 sound, then it will play back correctly, but if you seek to halfway the movie, the time slider will just continue ticking as if no seek happened (even though it did). A/V sync might also be slightly affected by this (still researching that). A quick but correct fix is being worked on.
• You cannot seek (yet) on MPEG-1/-2 video-only (.m1v, .m2v), FLC video (.flc/.flx), raw AC-3. raw MPEG-2/-4 AAC (.aac) and raw DTS streams. You will also not be able to get position information from those formats, or the information will be highly incorrect. Please note that this has nothing to do with DTS, AC-3 or MPEG embedded in Quicktime/MP4, AVI or MPEG streams.
• mms://, rtp:// (input protocols), WMV9 (video codec), WMA3 and QDM2 (audio codecs) and most Real-formats are not yet supported.

Real…
Now that I’m at this topic anyway, can I please publically request Real to either back down from the free software community or make it possible for us to communicate with their Real-format modules? I’ve seen enough split tongues in my life already. Real is an extremely bad player in the free software community. It solely abuses the community to add features to their so-called open Helix project (with forced permission to steal code) to consequently really steal this code and embed it in the actually somewhat useful but closed-source and highly-IP-protected Real player. Open up so we can embed Real content in GStreamer. Legally. Thank you.

Edit: if any of the Real people reads this, also re-read this message on desktop integration. To add up to that, also note that we’ve now been chosen as default for KDE(-4.0), too.