If built against gstreamer 0.10, totem 1.4.0 refuses to play DVDs, giving a confusing error message. ("missing plugins" or similar). I rebuilt totem against gstreamer 0.8; I suggest Gentoo do the same until DVD support is added back in.
gst 0.8 didn't play DVDs well either and the postinst note still sais so. It is however one of the more obvious regressions 2.12 -> 2.14 . You can actually play dvd titles as URI (dvd://x) . I however don't think we should revert to an older gst/totem just for this.
Sorry but this is a stupid suggestion. Virtually every other type of movie plays much better under GStreamer 0.10 than under 0.8. Also by compiling against 0.8 of gstreamer would mean it won't respect the settings you set in Gnome for audio and video output which is more important than replacing no DVD playback than with semi-broken DVD playback.
Well this is quite annoying considering totem is configured by default as the default player for DVDs and it doesn't work in Gnome. So basically we're shipping an out of the box broken setup. User A installs Gentoo. User A selects Gnome for their desktop. User A decides to watch a movie on their system. User A is told they need to install the right plugins. User A installs the DVD related gstreamer plugins because they know Totem uses gstreamer but they install the 0.8 stuff. Still doesn't work for User A. User A recompiles Totem, which now builds itself against gstreamer 0.8. User A gets DVD playback support. User A is more advanced then most users. User B installs Gentoo. User B selects Gnome. User B tries to watch a DVD. User B receives confusing error message. User B searches around but doesn't find a solution. User B is can't find this bug easily because it's marked Resolved->Invalid. User B gets frustrated and finds that Gentoo doesn't support watching DVDs. User B switches to Ubuntu. User C thinks foser and zaheerm should come up with a better solution then a closed bug. A solution like making mplayer the default DVD playing application for a Gnome installation.
While I don't think that Gentoo should build totem against gst 0.8, this bug is not infact invalid.
I think setting default DVD player to empty in gnome volume manager is the only thing that can be done. Making gnome depend on mplayer is silly. We are not too far from having totem-gst010 play dvd's with menus and subtitles. Also seamless, a gtk+/gstreamer 0.10 dvd player plays dvds with menus and subtitles perfectly. But making gnome dep on that is silly too as its not part of the Gnome Desktop. One possibility is having the dvd use flag pull in seamless. (which we have not put an ebuild for).
Is this not fixed now in the new totem version (1.4.1 and 1.4.2) which are not yet in the tree ?
(In reply to comment #6) > Is this not fixed now in the new totem version (1.4.1 and 1.4.2) which are not > yet in the tree ? I don't think so. The problem is that there is currently no GStreamer 0.10 plugin for playing DVDs.
Incorrect, there are dvd playback elements. They are just not usable in playbin yet, which is what totem uses. This is not really a bug in gentoo, so why do we a) have it open and b) have it as a blocker for another bug?
Upstream bugs: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330086 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340433 We've established that this isn't really a regression (DVDs didn't work with gstreamer 0.8, and can still be played with URL dvd://). However, the problem remains that *as we ship it*, Gnome autoplays DVDs in an application that can't handle them. One possible fix is to autoplay in mplayer, gxine or seamless. This introduces an extra dependency, however. Other fix is to disable autoplay of dvds. I'll resolve this CANTFIX and start another bug to disable autoplay of DVDs in the g-v-m schemas.
Disable (for now) DVD autoplay: bug 129058
Uh, that should be bug 139223. Sorry for the spam.