Spent entirely too much time this weekend dealing with Linux multimedia troubles. Eventually, after reinstalling xine and installing totem and mplayer, I decided on a whim to install RealPlayer 10. Not surprisingly, it refused to load. I uninstalled it and despondingly clicked on a Quicktime file. To my amazement, it worked. Since RealPlayer is unable to play QuickTime files, I suspect that its installation did not make the QuickTime file suddenly work (yet another computing unsolved mystery...). This is a problem, since if it "breaks" again, I am SOL.
The uninformative Totem dialog box only occurs if I use Gentoo's portage to build totem with the gstreamer backend. When I compiled it myself (using the xine libraries, which I have found are more stable), it would run intermittently if I selected a multimedia file. Attempts to run it from the command line or without a file for input caused it to hang, making it difficult to debug.
At 2:58 on May 19, 2005, This is Martey Dodoo wrote:
All Operating Systems Suck
At 8:59 on November 10, 2005, Tim wrote:
...if you're still wondering, try this in a terminal:
"gstreamer-properties"
You'll see a window pop up, select the "Video" tab, select an alternative output and test to see if it works. It fixed the problem for me.
At 3:47 on November 11, 2005, Martey wrote:
Thanks, but the problem was not with the video sink that GStreamer was using, but that GStreamer was buggy at the time (more than a year ago). As I noted in a previous post, Totem worked fine as early as April of this year.