As you may have noticed, Totem development was not much active in past few years. Bastien, its lead developer and maintainer was reassigned to a different work position and there were almost no contributions (except translation updates) from other members. Also, the only supported Totem version seems to be the Flathub one (and even that is outdated at this point) with the main Totem Git branch having Flathub-specific changes not intended for non-Flathub distribution and the only general purpose branch being “gnome-43”. It looks like that Totem is slowly heading towards its end. But do we have any reasonable replacement?
As far as I know, the plan is to (possibly) have it replaced with Showtime, and don’t get me wrong, that app looks neat and I love its modern GUI, but there are some things that do not look so ideal to me. First, the app is written in Python - but that is just my personal opinion. I really like Python, but do prefer Rust or C(++) for GUI apps. Next, and most importantly, it uses FFmpeg instead of GStreamer. Is this really a good fit for GNOME and/or important downstream distributions like Fedora? If not, are there any plans to use GStreamer instead?
I wonder what the actual plan is here.
I don’t want this to sound like a rant, instead I would like to open up a discussion on this topic.
Err, how did you get the idea it’s using FFmpeg?
FTR., it’s using Gstreamer and, like an increasing number of Gnome apps, uses the rust written gtk4paintablesink (video/gtk4 · main · GStreamer / gst-plugins-rs · GitLab) for the heavy lifting of Gst<->GTK4 integration.
Totem 43.1 was released on Oct 22 (4 days ago) by Bastien, which is good.
Please don’t declare a project as dead etc, unless you’re the maintainer. I agree with you wanting to open a discussion, in which case a title like "Future of totem" would be more appropriate etc.
Sorry I meant that no other gnome video player than totem can play dvd (or bluray). So obviously I confirm that totem can play dvd. But Showtime, Clapper, etc cannot.
