Linux Media Players

Well, with the move to version 2, Amarok has gone from being actually quite usable provided you turn off all the annoying shit, to just plain annoying. So I’ve had to find a new audio player for Linux.

Whenever I’ve tried Audacious before, there have been annoying bugs in the UI that make it unusable for me. Mostly involving rolling up the three different windows and unrolling them again. Which is a shame, because otherwise it would be my first choice. The old XMMS/Winamp2 interface, but done in GTK2. No ‘media library’, no organising my music files or any crap like that. Just a decent music player. Using Gstreamer for the back-end would be nice, but I’m not that bothered.

So when I decided to try it again yesterday, I was very pleased to discover that the annoying bugs seem to have been ironed out. So I’ve decided to stick with it for now. If it turns out to have some hideous problem that I’ve thus far missed, I can always go back to XMMS.

Meanwhile, however, the Xine back-end for Totem has been dropped, to be replaced by Gstreamer. Last I knew, Gstreamer was pretty well sorted for audio playback (see my comment above), but wasn’t quite there yet for video. Having tried it recently, though, Totem-Gstreamer does seem to have improved since I last tried it. There are still some issues with DVD menus (once a film is playing, it doesn’t seem to be possible to go back to the menu), and a strange bug where for a small number of videos (all .avi, but I’m not sure about the codec), pressing space to pause the video while in full-screen causes the entire thing to cease responding to commands. It only becomes responsive again when I switch to another workspace with Ctrl+Alt+Right. However, a bug in Xine that causes navigation to be broken in a number of .wmv videos (to the point of being unusable) doesn’t seem to be present with Gstreamer, so there are plusses and minuses. I therefore haven’t given up on Totem entirely yet, although I am wondering whether it might be worth trying switching to VLC, which seems to cope well with pretty much everything I try it with these days.

2 Comments

  1. I have tried it. I seem to remember it looked promising, but had some way to go, although that was a little while back and it may have come on a bit since then. It also lacked the capability to turn off some of the unnecessary crap that needed turning off in Amarok to make it tolerable.

    For audio, I’m fairly pleased with Audacious so far. Now that the intrusive UI problems have been fixed it’s pretty good: does the job without getting in the way. It’s just for video that I’m not sure what’s the best way to go.

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