GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 370732
Play/pause inconsistancy
Last modified: 2008-04-29 00:12:06 UTC
This bug was reported to the Debian BTS. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=382106 "spacebar pauses totem in fullscreen mode, but does not in windowed mode. for consistancy purposes, spacebar should really perform the same in both modes."
This has been explained numerous times. The space bar is used to activate widgets, so for accessibility reasons, we can't do that in windowed mode.
Bastien, while we can document this in the Debian packages, perhaps you might want to close bugs you keep seeing reported with a FAQ entry? This would be a way to help silence a percentage of the most frequent bug reports. Thanks!
Added to the FAQ[1] Q: Why doesn't the space bar work to play/pause in windowed mode? It only works in fullscreen, and sometimes in windowed mode. A: The space bar will work in fullscreen. But when in windowed mode, for accessibility reasons, we cannot use the space to play/pause (it is used to "push" buttons already). It will work <i>sometimes</i>, as the play/pause button, or the video widget might be the one with the keyboard focus. Try using "P" to play/pause instead. [1]: Should be at http://www.gnome.org/projects/totem/#faq soon
as i explained on the debian bts (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=382106), the problem with this behavior is that users get confused by things that are inconsistent. the solution is not that spacebar has to pause in both windowed and fullscreen, but instead should not do anything in both situations (well its fine to continue its behavior in windowed mode as a button activator). besides, the menus all say that P is how the user should play/pause their movie. hence, only P should be used as a universal play/pause key. thank you for your consideration and hard work. mike
has there been any further consideration on this bug? i really think that space should be disabled as a pauser key in fullscreen mode. as an aside, i just noticed that the "pause" key actually does not cause totem to pause. the most logical place an average user would look to pause an application would in fact be the "pause" button. why is this not the case?