It’s no secret that media playback is more convoluted on Linux than it should be. The Ubuntu distribution has made a number of efforts to the reduce the pain felt in this area, most of which I applaud, although it’s no where near as good as it should be. It all comes down to an ideological clash between some open source developers and secretive proprietary software vendors. Not surprisingly, on switching to Ubuntu as a primary platform for my laptop I have encountered some problems with media playback.
In theory Ubuntu should come with everything that I need, but the reality is that there are incompatibilities and bugs that mean I can’t have my cake and eat it too. Ubuntu 8.10 comes with a media framework called GStreamer that is supposed to glue everything together and make life easier. In some ways it succeeds and in others not so. The problem is that when it comes to GStreamer and playing a host of media formats reliably it just doesn’t. This is because some of the media codecs it provides are pretty rubbish in the real world. The default media application in Ubuntu is Totem. Totem uses GStreamer by default, but this just makes things worse as Totem is just not that great at much and seems to multiple your woes when mixed with GStreamer. Of course you can switch to the Xine version of Totem (which uses a different framework / back-end) but this in turn fixes some woes and creates new ones (eg. web browser embedded Quicktime playback becomes problematic). Thankfully there is VLC media player.
VLC Media Player is a popular program for playing just about any kind of media on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. It works quite well under in Ubuntu 8.10 and so I have set it to be the default player for most video types. It does have one annoying glitch in that it doesn’t play well with Compiz (the 3d desktop effects) and video hardware acceleration. VLC Media PLayer also has a Mozilla Plugin which lets you use VLC for all embedded media playback while browsing the web; it does a reasonable job of this. Of course there were always going to be compromises made.
For the moment I’ve settled on VLC Media Player as my default video player and I’ve turned off Compiz so that my video playback will be 100%. I’m currently undecided as to whether Totem GStreamer or Totem Xine is the better option. Totem GStreamer seems to do the best job of embedded playback, Totem Xine not so much. But Totem Xine is almost as good as VLC Media Player and makes everything look integrated and Ubuntu-ish. Right now I’m running Totem Xine as the default media player, VLC Media Player as the default video player for MP4 and XVID plus my choice for DVD playback, and am yet to decide between Totem Xine and VLC for my Mozilla plugin.
Update (31st December 2008): I’ve since discovered that the MPlayer Mozilla Plugin does, in my experience, a better job than the Totem or VLC plugins. Just remember that you need to uninstall (through Synaptic Package Manager) any other Mozilla plugins (such as Totem or VLC) for it to work properly. Also, Compiz (3D desktop effects) and video playback has started working for some unknown reason. So the long and the short of it is:
- Use Totem Xine instead of Totem GStreamer
- Use VLC Media Player for Video and DVD watching
- Use MPlayer Mozilla Plugin for embedded media playback