Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 366991
totem can't play DVDs with Movie -> Play Disc
Last modified: 2008-04-01 09:20:28 EDT
Description of problem: totem can't pay DVDs with Movie -> Play Disc but can play DVDs with Movie -> Open Location -> 'dvd://1' Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): totem-2.20.1-1.fc8 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. With DVD in the drive, open totem and do Movie -> Open Disc. This will give the following error message: Totem cannot play this type of media (DVD) because it does not have the appropriate plugins to be able to read from the disc. 2. Click OK, and then do Movie -> Open Location 3. Enter dvd://1 and the movie will start playing
dvd://1 plays only the first track, and doesn't offer menus, which is what people expect nowadays. GStreamer upstream needs to support menus before it can work as you expect. Also, dvd://1 will show problems with the sound when switching languages, and plenty of other fun bugs. In all cases, we don't ship any of the plugins necessary to play back DVDs.
I was using a home-made non-ecrypted DVD which I think can be played back with the software shipped with Fedora (although I have not tested this). IMO if a DVD works with dvd://1, it should be allowed to play with Movie -> Play Disc. Better to have partial support than none at all. But as the application developer, that's your call :-) As an aside, I ran into this issue when I was trying to play a training video for a course I took. The DVD wasn't working with the instructor's laptop so I offered my laptop instead. I felt pretty lame when things didn't work and even lamer when I had to enter the URI to get it work. After the class, a couple of people were interested in "the strange" programs on my computer. They also noticed that I had to type in some "secret code" to get the DVD to play. I couldn't help feeling that this incident really just reinforced what they had heard about linux - that's it's hard to use. Anyway, just thought I'd share this little story - thanks for your comment. Cheers, Ben
FYI, this is fixed in Totem 2.23.0 in rawhide.