Wednesday 6 May 2009

An era comes to an end

I'm not changing jobs, or getting married, it's all a bit more important than that.

Totem's xine-lib backend is now gone in git master, for GNOME 2.28.

The GStreamer boys have come forward, fixed a lot of bugs, and implemented new features, which means that the GStreamer backend was getting held back by the features of the xine-lib backend.

Oh, and before people start complaining:
  • this is only in the development branch for now
  • if you haven't filed a bug about whatever problem the GStreamer backend caused for you, you're not allowed to complain

17 comments:

Philip said...

Great success!

Anonymous said...

The xine-lib backend has not been really as usable as the GStreamer one for several releases now, so I find this logical.

Does this correspond to a move to playbin2 ? AIUI there is finally support for AC3 passthrough, which was one of the biggest issues with GStreamer.

Anonymous said...

Replying to myself; this is the case, looking at the commit logs.

Great! I hope totem will rock more than ever.

oliver said...

Kudos to the Totem and Gstreamer devs! I noticed that in latest Ubuntu release, Totem-GStreamer also supports DVD menus and stuff - thanks for the great work!

Martin said...

Totem with gstreamer backend allows me to see only the first frame of video from Swedish television on the web. With the xinelib backend I can view whole videos. I guess one frame is better than none atleast. (That's bug #69564 from 2006 btw.)

Bastien Nocera said...

Martin, wrong bug number, unless you're referring to a problem with Midnight Commander...

Anonymous said...

as long as AC3 passthrough will work some time...

Martin said...

Woops, that was the launchpad bug. I guess there might not be an upstream bug report so I retract my complaint. ;) (It's still not working though.) Anyhow, I think settling on a single back-end is a good idea.

Sven said...

Martin, I think that's bug #401173, which I reported about two years ago.

Not exactly a deal breaker for me, but it would be nice if it worked.

AndyFitz said...

fuckyeah bastien. the future is now!

Martin said...

Sven, looks like the same bug. I didn't find your report when I searched so now I have mistakenly generated some spam on bugzilla by creating a duplicate.

Unknown said...

Congrats to Gstreamer devs and thanks for xine backend for serving us for so long!

Anonymous said...

@Martin - have you tried gst-launch with playbin2? For me (polish TV streams) playbin2 solves the first-frame-only problem.

Martin said...

Michal, the bug I experienced is solved with asfdemux from git. #401173 was recently closed and I just verified that it works for me too.

Sven said...

BTW, is there any word on the status of support for external subpicture subtitles (VobSub) in GStreamer?

Bug #350311 has been resolved, but I still haven't got this to work in Totem.

Unknown said...

How can I enable deinterlace for example for dvd videos with totem-gstreamer? with totem-xine it's easy accessible in the menus.
however, totem-gstreamer has done very big steps forward.

Anonymous said...

So, does that mean we finally get DVD playback in totem-gstreamer now? (saying this as a gstreamer fan, by the way; I don't use totem xine, but lots of others do)