Problems playing media files in totem

[Adolfa]

Hey guys i recently upgraded my operating system to Ubuntu 9.10 from Ubuntu 9.04. I am having problems playing .mov and .avi files in totem ever since. I installed restricted extras and totem is able to open the file, but it just gets stuck in the first frame. I can advance frames one by one but the video will not play normally. I have reinstalled codecs thinking it was an issue with them but that hasn't helped in any case. This problem seems to extend towards other programs as well such as kdenlive and pitivi. Please help

[Dr. V]

I have had this similar problem with totem. I think this problem started with xine and totem around the time Ubuntu 9.10 was released. This might be coincidental more than being related in my opinion. I think the issue is actually with Gstreamer. I have read somewhere that a few plugins being added to gstreamer should do the trick without any issues but this hasn't helped me in anyway on my system. While this problem is being fixed if at all it is a bug by the developers, i am using another open source media player called VLC for playing media files such as movies.

[jesse]

My videos seem to be playing properly on xine. This is a strange case i guess. My bet is that it is an issue with gstreamer. I suggest you to install totem-xine and uninstall totem-gstreamer. This probably is an issue with the gstreamer plugins and the new .deb packages that come with it. Try installing the plugins for it from the universe and multiverse repositories. Make sure you have the right codecs installed as well. Not all codecs will work properly with Ubuntu so check and replace the fault codecs with proper ones. This should resolve your issue in my opinion.

[Humberto]

I had a similar problem with playing media files such as xvid on totem. In my case i was using libavcodec which i downloaded from the upure64 repository. It seems the problem is that it doesn't work well with the official Ubuntu gstreamer packages. The libavcodec is too outdated to work with Ubuntu gstreamer packages. Also make sure you have gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly and bad installed if you are trying to play.rm files. Downgrading from libavcodec52 should solve the problem easily so i suggest you to give it a try.

[Calvin K]

Well i use the VLC and mplayer, both of them installed from the repositories. i am having no issues as such playing any media files so i suggest you try those. Pitvi uses gstreamer as well in the backend i guess which makes it behave like totem in my opinion. Install totem-xine and see if it makes any difference. If not then use VLC and i assure you it will work fine for you. Totem is a complete mess in my opinion. Gstreamer plugins are known to have lots of problems which i guess is shown up in totem. You could also give the ugly and bad plugins mentioned in the above post a try but those i think are only concerned with playing .rm files.

[Solomon]

Its the outdated libavcodec52 coupled with gstreamer which is causing the problem. Uninstall those codecs as they are not recent enough to work with gstreamer in Ubuntu 9.10. This is causing totem to give that problem. If totem keeps up the issue then i suggest you to start using VLC which is tons better than all these players put together. Installing totem-xine won't do any good either in my opinion since this is an issue with gstreamer. Those plugins mentioned above have nothing to do with your problem so avoid installing those unless you have issues playing .rm files. Hope this helps,good luck.