grip being removed [Re: rawhide report: 20050120 changes]

[Jamie Zawinski]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> 
> Totem uses GStreamer, and hence gstreamer-plugins-mp3 from the same
> old http://rpm.livna.org repository works just fine.

Ok, now that Totem can play MP3s, it seems not-totally-unacceptable, but
it's still inferior to xmms/bmp in several ways:

 - It uses a *huge* amount of CPU.  When I was running xmms or bmp,
   my load was hovering around 0.6; Totem makes it oscillate between
   2.8 and 3.8!

 - When listening to an icecast stream, there is no indication of
   what URL you are actually listening to ("Movie/Properties" doesn't
   show anything.)

 - Likewise, no metadata at all - no channel or song titles.

 - I don't see a way to turn off the big black "movie display" window.

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> 
> And the 'default is crap' issue is a red herring,
> because "if" its going to be re-packaged for core, I'm sure the
> bluecurve xmms theme core is now using would be used for bmp... which
> works just fine for bmp from what i can tell.

BMP is not so bad with the bluecurve-xmms theme, but it's still way, way
too small.  You must have either bigger pixels or much better eyes than
I do, because I just can't read five-point light-gray-on-white type.
(Maybe it would work to just double the size of all the image-files in
the theme, if a "Double Size" option isn't to be implemented?)

BMP also has the problem that when you have an Icecast URL in the
playlist window, there's no way to tell what its URL is -- all it will
show you is the last title or metadata the stream had, so you know the
last song you heard on it, but not what station it is.

So, if you want to ditch XMMS, I think some hacking is still needed. 
Neither of these programs quite cut it yet.  (And I don't think I'm
making power-user requests here or anything, these are just basic
usability regressions.)

-- 
Jamie Zawinski      jwz at jwz.org                  http://www.jwz.org/
                    jwz at dnalounge.com      http://www.dnalounge.com/
                                         http://jwz.livejournal.com/