GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 385034
Plugin package names for gstreamer 0.10 on Ubuntu
Last modified: 2006-12-12 12:30:49 UTC
Hi there Hope I'm reporting this in the right place -- 'Launchpad' said not to report bugs there. I think that the good/bad/ugly categories for GStreamer plugins are uninformative (and maybe a little bit too cute with the Sergio Leone thing). Two recent annoyances: (1) trying to play an M4A file in RhythmBox. I get a 'no entry' icon and message about not being able to play 'this kind of file'. I go to Synaptic (Ubuntu Edgy) and search for 'M4A' but nothing relevant appears. Seems that GStreamer deb packages don't include the list of supported filetypes in their description (it would be super useful if they did). (2) Totem deciding that it was able to play a particular given movie file, but then (only then) realising that it didn't have the required codecs. I think it may have been a Quicktime movie. There is something wrong with the default file associations, I guess. I don't know if GStreamer has the ability to add and remove file associations for Totem: it seems that there is an architectural problem here however. Much of this would be alleviated if the GStreamer package descriptions were more complete. Cheers JP
I should be more explicit: could the description text in the Ubuntu packages for the good/bad/ugly plugin packages for GStreamer be expanded with a list of supported file types (name, mimetype, file extensions) for each one?
We have nothing to do with the package descriptions, you'll have to take this up with the packager (Ubuntu in this case). I think whatever else we'd call base/good/ugly/bad, it would still not be particularly informative unless we'd call it gst-plugins-contains-this-and-this-and-this-and-this :) However, your annoyances are a real issue of course, and you'll find that this is being worked on, see for example bug #161922 and http://wiki.ubuntu.com/EasyCodecInstallation . Also bug #380198 about the non-helpful error message in totem et al. As for (2) - this is mostly a limitation of the mime type system AFAIK, and not easily fixable. Closing as NOTGNOME, the plugin-install/error message issues are tracked elsewhere.