default media player

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 4/12/05, Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas at apestaart.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> is there any reason why Totem is not the default media player in FC4 ?
> The test releases still have Helix Player, while Totem is now the
> default GNOME player, and currently it plays more formats.  (Helix
> Player was added quite late to FC3 and without any warning or discussion
> - I probably should have brought it up sooner :))

I'd have to agree that there needs to be serious evaluation of totem
again as the default player for fc4.  I'm not aware of a technical
advantage that Helix has out-of-the-box. And unless Helix has grown
some interesting new plugin support... its immensely easier to just
replace Helix with Real when you go looking for additional codec
support. From a user perspective I don't see a compelling reason to
use Helix over Real in any real-world situation. Totem on the other
hand when backed by gst has a reasonable useful mechanism to extend
its support via additional gst plugins instead of being replaced
wholesale with another player application. And the gst dependancy
makes for tighter integration with the default desktop.  I'm reading
http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/desktop/defaults.html
and I personally don't see a profound reason to keep Helix as the
default when compared to totem based on the objective criteria
setforth there.

If there are differing opinions grounded in technical criteria for
helix still being the default, I'd appreciate hearing them for
perspective.

-jef