Bug#680147: totem: bad user experience playing HD movies on systems with less than 3 GHz

[Paul Menzel]

Package: totem
Version: 2.30.2-6
Severity: important

Dear Debian folks,


please excuse this report as it is difficult to describe my problem.

A friend got a new digital camera which is able to record 1920x1080 H264
movies. Trying to play it on her system the default application is
Totem, but the movie did not play fluently and it was more like a slide
show on a system with an Athlon 4850e with two 2,5 GHz cores, which left
my friend unhappy.

So basically by default there is bad user experience. This would be
acceptable, if there were not the following two facts.

1. With Microsoft Windows playing these files works fine.
2. Using MPlayer with the FFmpeg/libav libraries it is more or less
played fluently.

       mplayer -lavdopts threads=8 pathtofile.mov

Since item 1 is a driver issue and will be hardly fixed in the near
future with the free drivers and the only option for AMD/Nvidia is to
use the proprietary driver from non-free, the second item 2 is a viable
solution in my opinion.

GStreamer supports using FFmpeg libraries and this is packaged in
`gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg`. The problem is those are only used, when
GStreamer does not provide its own library. The alternative is to use
for example MPlayer with the command line above. But most “normal” users
do not know this (and they should not have to) and therefore cannot use
their system as they expect.

In my *opinion* this is a release critical bug, to prevent reactions
from users using Debian the first time from saying: “Well, it Debian
cannot even play my movie files. I continue to use Microsoft Windows. At
least that works!”.

So to summarize: To give a nice default user experience, please use the
most efficient libraries in Totem to play for example HD movies becoming
even more common nowadays.

I hope, you can agree that the above is a problem. Hopefully we can find
a solution so that Debian Wheezy will be a release a lot of people will
be satisfied with.


Thanks,

Paul


PS: Of course this bug should be filed against some GStreamer package,
since Totem relies on that and using

    gst-launch playbin2 uri=file:///absolute/path/to/file.mov

demonstrates that this also happens with plain GStreamer. It would be
great if you reassigned the report, that you would add the `affects
nnnnnn totem` relation(?).

PPS: For those interested, the system is an ASRock A780FullHD board with
an AMD 4850e 2 * 2,5 GHz processor and 4 GB RAM.


[1] http://packages.debian.org/sid/gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
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