March 13, 2006

Still A Little Way To Go...

I've just finished watching Jeff Waugh speaking about Ubuntu at the end of FOSDEM - I missed the talk because I was at the l10n session in the Mozilla developer room. He talked about how they had been making Ubuntu ready for the desktop; how open source software is often better than proprietary, particularly the out-of-the-box user experience; and how open formats are great, and everyone should be encouraged to use them rather than the proprietary stuff.

The encouraging nature of his words was only partly spoiled by the fact that I was watching an Ogg Theora video in Totem on a standard install of Ubuntu's latest stable release, and the syncing between audio and video was on average out by about 20 seconds for the entire period of playback, and the video changed speed every half a second, alternating between super-fast and frozen.

Posted by gerv at March 13, 2006 11:33 PM
Comments

There's been lots of improvement in video playback. The next release of Ubuntu will include gstreamer .10, which is /much/ better at video than what you're using on 5.10.

Posted by: jorge at March 14, 2006 1:46 AM

yeah too bad gstreamer .10 doesnt even like dvd playback, the insistence on using gstreamers with ubuntu is confusing to me. @Gerv: dude sudo apt-get install totem-xine

Posted by: poningru at March 14, 2006 8:12 AM

poningru: are there any drawbacks to using totem-xine?

Posted by: Gerv at March 14, 2006 9:47 AM

Gerv: not comparing to gst 0.8. In particular you'll notice far less lag.

- Chris

Posted by: Chris Cunningham at March 14, 2006 12:37 PM

May be you can try the helix engine.

Posted by: justkeeper at March 14, 2006 3:05 PM

I have never, ever, managed to make totem work. I love Linux but not for the videos.

Posted by: Gabriel at March 14, 2006 3:59 PM

use totem-xine. it just works (in breezy too, and in hoary too).
watched that exact same video (not to the end yet) on totem-xine, perfect.
gstreamer 0.10 is said to be fixed for synchronization but no DVD menus on 0.10 yet so totem-xine it is, still.

Posted by: emmanuel at March 16, 2006 11:21 AM

btw, watched that same video ON BREEZY, like you. totem-xine just works.

Posted by: emmanuel at March 16, 2006 11:21 AM