Replacing Totem with MPlayer in Gnome

Jun 26, 2007

Totem is the official media player for Gnome, but due to some limitation of the gstreamer backend or some other issue, you may find it does not meet your needs.

So as an alternate solution to this application a suite of applications have been written that use the MPlayer media player application. MPlayer is an extreamly powerful video tool and it can playback a large number of formats. However, MPlayer is not very tightly integrated with any desktop environment (Gnome, KDE...etc).

Therefore, I have written a set of applications to integrate MPlayer with Gnome.

• GNOME MPlayer - A Gnome shell for MPlayer
• Nailer - A command line tool that provides the functionality of totem-video-thumbnailer
• Gecko Mediaplayer - A Firefox plugin that allows media playback in the browser

Removal of Totem

On some distributions totem can be removed easily, but on others the packages are tightly tied to the parent Gnome package.

Suggestions on how to disable totem if you can't remove totem:

• Rename /usr/bin/totem-video-thumbnailer to /usr/bin/totem-video-thumbnailer.disabled
• Rename /usr/bin/totem to /usr/bin/totem.disabled
• Rename or Delete the libtotem* files from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins and /usr/lib/firefox/plugins. Make sure that when you open Firefox and open the location "about:plugins" that there are no totem plugins installed
• Delete the files in $HOME/.thumbnails/normal
• Remove/Rename/Move the files totem.schemas and totem-video-thumbnail.schemas. Usually, these are found in /etc/gconf/schemas
• Remove/Rename/Move totem.desktop. Usually this is found in /usr/share/applications
• Run 'update-desktop-database'. You may have to run this as root

Installation of applications based on MPlayer

• Running make and then make install should work for most installation
• If you have Fedora 6 or 7 installed, then you can install my repository and then run 'yum install gecko-mediaplayer nailer' and that should do it. Also, you need to have mplayer installed from either Livna or FreshRPMS
• Restart nautilus by running 'killall nautilus' or logging out and then back into Gnome.
• You will know that nailer is working by deleting the files in $HOME/.thumbnails/normal and then opening a directory in Nautilus that contains some movies and you should see some thumbnails created for those movies. If the thumbnails are not created then you need to check that the nailer.schemas file was installed with the other schemas files. Every distro does things a little differently, so I can't list them all.
• GNOME MPlayer should be available in the Applications menu under 'Sound & Video'
• Firefox should have several plugins installed that have the library name of 'gecko-mediaplayer*'

Comments: email kdekorte AT gmail DOT com