[CentOS] totem: something wrong with gstreamer-plugins-ugly

Sun Jan 24 23:17:20 UTC 2010
Michael A. Peters <mpeters at mac.com>

ken wrote:

> 
> 
> So how are people getting totem to play movies?
> 
> tia.
> 
> 

I hope no one crucifies me for suggesting closed source, but I got tired 
of the issues with gstreamer-plugins-whatever and just purchased the 
fluendo codec pack.

http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/complete-set-of-playback-plugins/

Not only does it "just work" (in both CentOS 5.x and Ubuntu Jaunty) but 
it works better than the plugins-bad and plugins-ugly ever did for me, 
especially for windows media video.

The only drawback is that they don't have an AC3 decoder. My 
understanding is that in actuality they do, but are still having trouble 
getting licensing worked out with Dolby.

I solve that issue with (only ever is an issue for me with mkv files) by 
using the following shell script:

#!/bin/bash

base=`echo $1 |sed -e s?"\.mkv$"?""?`

vidTrack=`mkvinfo ${base}.mkv |grep "Track type" |grep -n "video" |cut 
-d":" -f1`
audTrack=`mkvinfo ${base}.mkv |grep "Track type" |grep -n "audio" |cut 
-d":" -f1`

mkvextract tracks ${base}.mkv ${vidTrack}:${base}.h264
mkvextract tracks ${base}.mkv ${audTrack}:${base}.ac3

a52dec -o wavdolby ${base}.ac3 > ${base}.wav
rm -f ${base}.ac3
normalize-audio ${base}.wav


ffmpeg -i ${base}.h264 -i ${base}.wav -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -vcodec copy 
-acodec libfaac -ab 128k -y -f mp4 ${base}.mp4

rm -f ${base}.h264 ${base}.wav

-=-=-

It also doesn't play DVD's but I use xine for that, the few times I do 
need to do it (fluendo sells a dvd player too, that does do AC3, but 
reviews I've read on their dvd player are poor. The plugins though work 
well, very well)