GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 736545
Totem presents videos that can't be played
Last modified: 2018-05-24 10:58:18 UTC
Testing the out of the box experience with Fedora 21 alpha last night, I opened the "Channels" section in Videos and tried to play a video. The video failed to play of course, because Fedora didn't have the necessary codecs (MPEG-4, H.264). It's quite a poor initial experience to present content that cannot be played (compounded by the very poor way that PackageKit presents it - obviously not Totem's fault, but still makes it worse).
1. We cannot be certain whether we're going to be able to play videos, even if we did filter them out. In this case, we don't even know that it's H264 inside, so we couldn't filter it out anyway. 2. Catch 22, how do you trigger codecs installation if you can't open the files? Let me know if you have specific requests for Totem in terms of UI for the missing plugins, but hiding the non-playable videos isn't feasible.
Whatever the specifics of this bug, I hope we can agree that an out of the box experience where you are shown a bunch of content that produces errors when selected isn't acceptable. (In reply to comment #1) > 1. We cannot be certain whether we're going to be able to play videos, even if > we did filter them out. In this case, we don't even know that it's H264 inside, > so we couldn't filter it out anyway. We which codecs each of these channels requires though, right? > 2. Catch 22, how do you trigger codecs installation if you can't open the > files? It would be easy to design some UI for installing codecs, which would then result in channels being displayed. But again, that requires knowing which channels are available and which codecs they require.
(In reply to Allan Day from comment #2) ... > We which codecs each of these channels requires though, right? Should have been: "We know which codecs each of these channels requires though, right?"
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/totem/issues/120.