bill toulas | August 25, 2012

Totem becomes…Videos!

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

Totem continued the Gnome development frenzy that peaked lately, also releasing a 3.5.90 version (3.6 beta) that brings many things that we should be happy about.

The changes concern both obvious optical GUI changes, and functional under the hood improvements and the combining result is a big step towards the future for Gnome’s default video player application.

First of all, Totem was renamed to Videos in the same context of renaming every Gnome core app into its main using purpose like the Epiphany renaming to Web for example.

There are also plenty of build fixes to make it possible to build with Wayland support and now we can truly say that Videos is “preparing” for the future. This is very important for both development and testing – feedback purposes. This is also the first release that is fully ported to Gstreamer 1.0.

Two obvious GUI changes are the hiding of the title bar when Videos is maximised and the moving of some menu items to the app menu like shown on the below screenshots:

Full changelog:

  • Plenty of build fixes to make it possible to build with Wayland support
  • Increase thumbnail size to 256 px

Movie player:

  • Rename to “Videos”
  • Hide titlebar when maximised
  • Move some menu items to the app menu
  • Command-line parsing bug fixes
  • Use Grilo to list DVDs and other optical media
  • Remove connection speed preferences
  • Stop DVD playback when disc is ejected
  • Fix ordering of the playlist after drag’n'drop

Backend:

  • Port to GStreamer 1.0
  • Add HTTP proxy support
  • Much improved error messages
  • Add variable rate playback
  • Use Clutter for the OSD
  • Disable visualisations by default
  • Animate rotations
  • Add av-offset support
  • Prepare the ground for chapter support in non-DVDs

Plugins:

  • Make screenshot UI-less, like in gnome-shell
  • Simplify the screensaver and browser plugin code
  • Remove publish and iPlayer plugins
  • Use Grilo 0.2
  • Better search sidebar
  • Add hook for site-specific user-agents
  • Add hook for custom subtitle selection through plugins
  • Move recent-files handling to a plugin

Since this is an unstable beta release, I suggest you wait till the release of Gnome 3.6 to meet the new Videos, but you can always compile it from source if you can’t wait!

Get Videos 3.5.90

This article was posted in News and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments with the RSS feed for this post.Post a Comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
                 
  • Guest

    Hm, nice to see that this application is also under developmend (if I use VLC), but I don’t know maybe its me, but it do not looks ‘gnome 3 like’ at this moment for me…
    Hope that the interface will be improved maybe I change than from VLC (which I used for years now under windows and linux)

    • http://varemenos.com/ Adonis K. (Varemenos)

      its cant get more gnome-ish than that…

      • alex285
      • Guest

        Sorry, but this sounds a little bit like a leak of fantasy and creativity…

      • gnomophobic

        of course it can, has so many options right now.
        this is even more gnome

        • gnomophobic
        • liam

          Since it uses libpeas it has a fantastic plug-in system that allows all kinds of extensions. From the ridiculously useful subtitle downloaded to gstreamer pipeline modifications. The point of totem, and however, is to play movies not provide knows to tweak. If you want pre built knows use vlc, though it looks terrible on a gnome desktop . If you know what you want you can build your own knows with plugins in totem.

    • alex285

      Check the link below. VLC plays in another level. It is super. But Totem will be an integrated part of Gnome.

      • Guest

        I’m a little bit confused. Will this Video application an replacment for Totem/Video (so that the core from Totem is used for this and the interface changed) or is this a application “only” for the tablet use.
        I mean evolution is also still under development, but has its successors:
        - https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Mail
        - https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Calendar
        I don’t think that all of these evolution core is used in Mail and Calender, or (sounds like a bit of developer resources waste…)

        • alex285

          Nop, this a new context selection for video files. Similar to gnome images. You can seek (local and online) and (pre)view videos inside there, but Totem will be a separate App.

          Mail and Calendar are two new Apps, not meant for replacing the Evolution suite. There isn’t waste of sources in a big factor, because Gnome modules share the same technologies. Not quite a work is involved.

    • Bill_Toulas

      It would be interesting to tell us what elements exactly you believe look out of place

      • http://profiles.google.com/l33ts0n Arron Washington

        I’m not the original commentator, but…

        * Tons of menu items that should be using a “settings” gear widget instead + “AppMenu.” Seriously, Videos is a player, not an editor — so why is there an “edit” menu?
        * Action items (play buttons, etc buttons) at the bottom instead of the top.
        * The awkward playlist sidebar could be removed entirely and be replaced with a nice coverflow-style navigation of videos in the current directory; in other words, clicking “playlist” would bring up coverflow navigation inside of the current playing video canvas, or push up the currently playing video and be displayed just underneath it if you wanted to browse videos while the current one was playing for some reason. Coverflow would be good for touch support as well.

      • ScionicSpectre

        https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Videos Check out the designs near the bottom. This is what Totem will eventually look like if it’s to become the Videos application (although this design will likely undergo further refinments).

        GNOME 3 applications will avoid menubars except in the most extreme cases (advanced applications like GIMP and LibreOffice), and the finding and reminding applications in particular will utilize ‘type to search’ as well as advanced, touch-enabled content selection. That is to say that people will use the application to browser videos as well as view them, rather than using a file chooser.

        Also, stuff like the sidebar is likely to change as well according to GNOME 3′s HIGs. So Videos is definitely not there yet.

  • gnome
  • gnome
  • http://www.facebook.com/bwat47 Brandon Watkins

    Totem’s been totally useless for me since 3.x, there’s an annoying bug where with some touchpads you cannot bring up the video controls in fullscreen at all.

    • http://twitter.com/jjardon Javier Jardón

      Hi, could you share the bug report number please?

  • ScionicSpectre

    Nice and… messy. If I recall correctly, Eye of GNOME was changed to have the titlebar go away while maximized for 3.4, but it was decided that it looked bad with the menubar. It was decided that should change first, otherwise applications will behave inconsistently, so I was under the impression that any application with a menubar would keep the titlebar (since it’s likely it wasn’t made to be a full-screen application in the first place).

    It’s going to take a lot of changes to get this to be the Videos application, but I look forward to it. Seeing as how Music and Photos are both new applications (instead of being adapted from Rhythmbox and Eye of GNOME), it will be interesting to see how successful this approach is. I guess if Epiphany and Nautilus are any indication it should go well.

  • liam

    This has been my goto video player for awhile now, and but, recently, and there’s been an unfortunate regression. In the past you could skip forward or back by using the scroll wheel and hovering over the Window. I Now you have to either grab the timeline indicator or use the scroll wheel while hovering over the tiny time line. This is a pretty big usability regression.
    Additionally since this is using a clutter view, when in full screen mode the time line should be using a composited timeline overlay. I first, and it looks much nicer, and second, and it is much larger and easier to read if you are watching movies on the tv and don’t want to install a purpose built program like xbmc.
    The gnome team really need to start making better use of the modern features clutter provides.