Daniel’s Blog.

Trouble playing movies with Totem?

I’ve never really liked totem. It’s set up as the default movie player, but I always had problems getting it to play movies - some would play fine, others wouldn’t. It always worked for quicktime movies however.

Today, Craig asked about playing quicktime under Totem. This suprised me, because it was the one thing I had working well. We both run Ubuntu Dapper.

After closer inspection, it seems we had different gstreamer plugins installed. There’s quite a few of these packages in Ubuntu, so missing one or another is probably quite easy.

• gstreamer0.10-plugins-base - GStreamer plugins from the “base” set
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-good - GStreamer plugins from the “good” set
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad - GStreamer plugins from the “bad” set
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly - GStreamer plugins from the “ugly” set
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse - GStreamer plugins from the “ugly” set (Multiverse Variant)
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse - GStreamer plugins from the “bad” set (Multiverse Variant)

These are described better at  http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/modules/.

So now I have gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse installed which includes the xvid codec. All good!