Totem Media Player on SUSE Linux

[KurtK]

Greetings,

I took reciept of my new ThinkPad last week and have since been busy getting everything setup. The machine came preconfigured from Lenovo with SUSE Linux 10.

My problem is that I find a media player called Totem, but it can't play DVDs or Windows media files. What gives? Am I trying to use the wrong media player? Does the ThinkPad support DVD playback? I'm having a hard time finding the correct codec RPMs to install to make this thing replay DVD and other media formats.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.

//Kurt

[aaa]

Closed-source codecs usually aren't included by default. You need to find certain gstreamer plugin rpms (they have names like "ugly" and "bad"), for codecs like that.

As for DVDs, I am not sure. Involves libdvdcss or something.

[KurtK]

I've little faith in Totem when it's development community uses terms like "bad" and "ugly". I think Lenovo and/or Novell should reconsider their choice for MM playback support in their distro.

I've found an alternative to Totem called MPlayer. It appears to be somewhat more mainstream and has support for the things I'm looking for. Downside is that I will need to build it and all it dependencies from source, which looks to be no small feat.

[michaaa62]

I've little faith in Totem when it's development community uses terms like "bad" and "ugly". I think Lenovo and/or Novell should reconsider their choice for MM playback support in their distro.
I've found an alternative to Totem called MPlayer. It appears to be somewhat more mainstream and has support for the things I'm looking for. Downside is that I will need to build it and all it dependencies from source, which looks to be no small feat.

Sounds quite cheeky for second post.
Faith is nothing you should have because of words or names, but these packages named after "The Good, The Bad, The Ugly" are trustworthy for thousends of Totem-Gstreamer users. You might change to Totem-Xine, if you wish, or even to mplayer.
Google for the packman repositories and how to use them, and you will free your system from the compilation workload and yourself from the trouble to get the dev packages right!

cheers micha

[tilneford]

The OP was heard to say:

My problem is that I find a media player called Totem, but it can't play DVDs or Windows media files. What gives?

Even the versions of MS Windows I have used do not usually ship with the ability to play DVDs. Windows Media Player still needs to use the DVD codecs to play DVDs. These codecs are installed when a dedicated DVD player is installed.

Totem-Gstreamer is one of the media players available in Linux, but like the Windows Media Player, it still needs the codecs to play DVD. I suspect Totem is shipped by default with Novel-Suse 10 and Lenovo had nothing to do with its inclusion in the Suse distribution.

Linux is like the proverbial cat with 9 lives, there is always more than one way to get to the desired endpoint. Many people like Totem, but I have never had great luck with it. There are 2 other media players, including DVD codecs, I have had more good fortune with. As another poster said, mplayer is good; it is out of hungary, I think, and I also think the codecs to play DVDs are available on their website.

I prefer VLC (video lan client), which has, to my understanding, a clean (reverse?) engineered set of codecs which play all the DVDs I throw at it. I use VLC on both Linux and XP. The XP version works great. It took forever, but I uninstalled the Roxio/Sonic/WinDVD stuff because it interfered with my Blackberry Pearl being recognized as a USB mass storage device in Explorer. I have no idea why. I really try not to use software which insinuates itself into the registry like Roxio/Sonic does. The website for VLC is:
www.videolan.org

[Scriptable]

I was frustrated with Totem and switched to VLC, a much better media player IMHO for trouble free use if you don't want to dig into issues when Totem doesn't work for you out-of-the-box. I still plan to play around with Totem (and Xine) when I get some time to work out why I had so many hassles.