Fedora Core 3 media woes
 

I just installed Fedora Core 3, and noticed that thumbnails in nautilus of videos weren't showing up. It'd display it's processing icon for a few seconds then go to the file type default icon. I've seen this before in previous versions, but it'd always been because I'd accidentally uninstalled Totem (which I'm not a big fan of, for reasons explained next). This isn't it just not making thumbnails, in that situation(which I've also been through)Pretty much every video type seems to be affected.

My other woe is that Totem (as well as the now included Helix player) can't play anything. I've had this problem with totem on every system i've installed fedora on, and've never fixed it, but, seeing as I use MPlayer, and it wasn't affecting anything else, I just ignored the problem. I suspect my thumbnail woes may be linked to this, but I'm not sure, and here I am asking for help.

Everything else is working fine, I've even got it making thumbnails of my Flash files (distorted thumbnails, but I'm not complaining). If anyone has ny ideas, I'm not the only one who's been having these problems. These are the only real problems I've been having with FC3, otherwise I'm quite satisfied with it,.

Hi sanmadjack,

I am experiencing the exact same problems, and this is _very_ frustrating indeed -- specially because it worked just fine with FC2. Totem seems to be pretty useless on FC3 (every movie file I try to play with it fails).

Well, Fedora's multimedia apps, usually disable certain features that can potentially cause Redhat to be sued. To get totem working properly, I installed xine-lib from source and then compiled totem (and it works perfectly). You can save yourself compilation time, by downloading rpms from this xine nightly builds page. You will need to download win32 codecs, xine-lib (and xine-ui if you want). Another alternative would be to download apt from freshrpms and install multimedia packges via apt/synaptic.

You need to download Realplayer for linux instead of using HelixPlayer, because HelixPlayer is missing some codecs that enable you to play certain multimedia formats.

reddazz, you were right about xine support, thks for the tip. I just replaced totem with totem-xine from freshrpms, and now totem doesn't bark anymore at movies. However, icons are still not previewed on nautilus... any advice on that?

I'm not well versed with nautilus but if I figure out a solution, I'll let you know.

Thanks a lot =) I will do the same.