getting totem movie player to work
 

when I try to play an mpeg video in totem it gives me an error message that says it cannot open the file: "Failed to open; reason unknown"

Is there something I have to do to get it to work?

Edit:
I'm using Fedora Core 3

i've had better luck with xine and xmms than totem, in all honesty.

Your problem is that the totem in FC3 uses Gstreamer which lacks the mpeg plugin by default .. so totem can't play the file .. goto freshrpms.net and get the totem-xine from there ..

just curious to know if you had any luck with it im thinking of installing it my self does any one know if it can play the video from a camcorder

totem-xine works for me .. I don't know about your camcorder though ..

I have a fresh install of Fedora Core 3, and I am experiencing the same problem (Totem refusing to read files for "reason unknown").

I am not a total newbie, but I am not a super-über-geek either. I know roughly how rpms work, but here is what I get when trying to get the totem-xine rpm from freshrpm.net :

That won't stop me, I'm still gonna try it. On with the first dependency, I google liblirc_client.so.0 fc3 and I get the lirc package. It installs without any problem, good.
Now onto the next, with a Google of libxine.so.1 fc3, letting me find the xine-lib package.

*sigh*... more failed dependencies. Ok, I can do this. Looking for libaa.so.1 fc3, Google points me to the aalib package which installs fine. Moving on to looking for libdvdcss, which leads to the libdvdcss package. Another easy install. Keeping going, libfame-0.9.so.1 fc3 leads me to the libfame package Hurray, another flawless install.

I have now installed the three failed dependencies of xine-lib, so I can install xine-lib now. With libxine.so.1, I can also try and install the totem-xine package (this is the whole point after all). I still get :

Ok, this could make sense. A totem is already there, so the new one doesn't want to install over it. All that is left to do now is to remove the old totem with "rpm -e totem", then install the new totem. Hurray, everything works, and my totem player can now play mpeg movies.

Now, my intent is really not to start a flame war or anything in the like, but just take a look at all the steps I had to take to be able to watch a mpeg movie. Out of the box, Fedora Core 3 has a movie player, but that player cannot read mpeg files, which is quite a common format on the internet. In order to let totem read mpegs, I had to install a package which had 3 failed dependencies, and one of those 3 dependencies also had 3 failed dependencies...

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I got it all working now, but why did I have to manually install 6 packages just to an application that is said to come out-of-the-box be usable? Why don't the required libraries come with the package that requires them? Can't the applications have a static link to the libraries they require instead of a dynamic link?

I'm not being sarcastic or asking rhetorical questions, I am really wondering why things are done this way. I hear a lot of bitching about DLL hell, but aren't we getting into a .so hell ourselves?

How about using the wonderful tool called "yum" that comes with FC3?

Head over to fedorafaq.org and have a look at

http://www.fedorafaq.org/#getsoftware

once you have yum configured as stated, you can just type

yum install totem-xine

and it will take care of everything for you (except the rpm -e totem part of course ;))

Yum is also a great way to keep ur system up2date.. just type

yum update

and it'll get and install all updates available.

Enjoy!

Just as a follow-on .. there is currently another package manager called "smart" that is very similar to YUM but supposedly does things a little better .. it even has a GUI frontend .. check out:

http://www.smartpm.org/

for details. I'f you're interested, I'd suggest that you head over to Dag's repo at:

http://dag.wieers.com/packages/smart/

and grab the FC3 packages from there. They already have most of the major repos configured for use.

Good luck!

Yum actually looks good, thanks for the pointer. Would have been a lot easier if you had said that in the first place ;-). The only pointer I had so far was "goto freshrpms.net and get the totem-xine from there", so I didn't know better.

oops .. sorry abt that .. I'll remember that for the next person who comes asking ;)

The problem with yum is that not all of us have internet connection within linux, I can't make my agere modem to work:(

I have the same problem sleeping had and did everything he did, everything went fine until this happened:

$ rpm -ivh xine-lib-1.0.0-0.16.rc7.1.fc3.rf.i386.rpm
error: xine-lib-1.0.0-0.16.rc7.1.fc3.rf.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: BAD, key ID 6b8d79e6
error: xine-lib-1.0.0-0.16.rc7.1.fc3.rf.i386.rpm cannot be installed

What is this about signature? And what are those warnings for NOKEY?

It's not just yum. Linux depends heavily on the internet - how else can you get updates and support?

Also, this is probably the right place to get help with getting your modem to work.

yes, I know, but I have to study a lot right now, and finding the right driver for modem requires some time (I already lost few days on it). I have internet working on my desktop and I'm trying to make it work on my lap-top (outside of windows). but it's just gonna have to wait for a bit longer.

about totem - I downloaded xine-lib again and, as I supposed, everything ended well, so now I can watch movies when I need a break from studying and don't need to enter windows for that.

but, I am still curious - what are those keys and ids for?

i think what davcefai is trying to say is that instead of posting about your modem in someone else's thread when it is off topic is not the right place. You could have started your own thread in the hardware section.

like I said - I don't have time to work on my modem now, sorry if you got the expression that I'm trying to get help on that here. I'm asking about problems I had during the installation of totem, I don't think I should open a new thread for that, or should I?!

This is off topic and I'm sorry for that, but I had to explain it in case somebody else didn't understand my question (maybe it's my english?)

Just for the record, I was not alluding to the thread Petra9 was in but that linuxquestions is the place where the modem problem can doubtless be resolved.

That's what I thought you said. Thanx, I'll do that very soon:)