Monday, 4 April 2011

Totem in GNOME 3.0, plans for 3.2

Totem for GNOME 3 is available in the GNOME FTP servers. And now onto GNOME 3.2.

There's a couple of major UI changes planned for Totem 3.2, with designs from the GNOME Design team (and Hylke in particular). These include the removal of the status bar, better fullscreen controls, more contrast when playing movies, etc.

New colours
The changes for contrast are already in Totem itself, and you can grab a 3.2 version of gnome-themes-standard to see the "dark" variant of Totem (or enjoy the screenshot below).

Black Swan, go see it.

New video widget
For the rest of the changes, we needed a video widget that was more flexible than the X-based one we were using. So from Totem 3.2, we'll start using clutter, and clutter-gst.

This means that we'll be able to implement things like OSDs for more than just the fullscreen version, use an indicator in the video directly when buffering for live streams instead of the status bar. It would also allow other useful features, like rotating videos with animations, to preview movies from your phone or camera in landscape mode.

Performance-wise, if you were already using an OpenGL-accelerated desktop, the difference should be minimal, comparing clutter-gst's video sink to an Xv overlay using OpenGL, the major difference being the addition of the videobalance element to the pipeline.

If you don't have OpenGL drivers for your machine, Totem 3.0 will still be maintained, with important bug fixes being backported.

Misc changes
We expect a Grilo plugin making its appearance, which will allow us to focus our bug fixing on the interface parts, rather than having to maintain the code to access various video resources.

We also made changes to the nautilus properties tab, which should make it faster, using Edward's GstDiscoverer.

You can start testing the clutter-based Totem, the dark variant, and the faster nautilus properties right now, in the master branch of Totem in GNOME git.


Hylke said...

I anyone is interested in helping out, design or implementation, check out :)

Thanks Bastien!

korbe said...

Good plans. ;)

But any plans for using GStreamer-vaapi[1] ?


hadess said...

korbe: GStreamer-vaapi, the VDPAU, or XvBA variants, or even support for the Broadcom Crystal HD cards should get auto-plugged into the playbin2 pipeline when hardware is available.

Definitely a GStreamer issue there, the players using playbin2 or even decodebin should not have to plug that in themselves.

Tomasz said...

Is black a direction GNOME is going? Right now gnome-shell and EOG (and soon Totem) stand out as very different black application in otherwise bright desktop.

hadess said...

Tomasz: No, black isn't a direction we're going in.

I already blogged about the dark theme additions to GTK+ earlier.

This is only to be opted-in for applications that display photos or videos as their main usage.

For what it's worth, the screenshot is missing changes to mutter to follow that same GTK+ theme dark variant, so the titlebars should be dark as well.

To conclude, not a Totem specific change, and only for select applications. It's not a general direction for all apps in GNOME.

pclouds said...

Can 3.0 and 3.2 be installed in parallel?

hadess said...

pclouds: No, and I would imagine that most distributors would take steps to ensure there's a fallback available.

ValentinV said...

Wouldn't bee better if the play, pause , volume, etc bar was moved at the top and actually be a tool bar ala mini tube. and the sidebar i think should act like a sidebar and open inside the video widget because currently it is extending the whole window and so the sidebar button moves when it is pressed when windows is maximized and doesn't move when the window has enough space to expand.

I think this would make totem more consistent with the rest of gnome.

alon said...

better fullscreen controls sounds good :) I have four displays on my home system setup as a 2x2, and it's annoying that fullscreen is actually a quarter on my system, would be nice if I could tell it to fullscreen so it covers all monitors. I know this is not a common setup but I imagine it's not a totally bizzare requirement.

hadess said...

alon: That doesn't sound like something we'd do actually.

john said...

Sounds interesting! It'd be nice to have the ability in fullscreen mode for multiple sceens to either blank the screens that aren't showing the video, and/or use them for something else. (e.g. the way presentation apps display notes or other controls on screens besides the main one.)

I often find myself closing my laptop screen "just so far" to prevent the screen from being too annoying when I watch video on my TV. But it'd be even nicer to have the internal screen blank (along with the backlight if possible), and note come back until I left fullscreen mode.

hadess said...

john: Unfortunately, we don't have any control over that. Hopefully the next versions of XrandR, or another extension will allow us to tweak that.

john said...

Gah! Google ate my reply. Gist of it:

Thanks for your reply, Bastien. Sorry I forgot to check in earlier.

That'd be nice to have a more elegant solution; in the meantime, would you entertain the idea of a workaround? I was thinking of something that enumerates the other physical screens, creating an all-black toplevel window that fills them. I'd imagine that the screensaver does something similar, no?

Just a thought, and maybe not a priority for you. Thanks for the work that you've been putting into Totem and keeping it simple and sweet!

Federico Apelhanz said...

What about selecting colors for the subs? and "hd subtitles" regardless of the resolution of the movie you are watching, Zip/rar support with passwords would also be nice.

Unknown said...

I am having issues with playing fullscreen in totem 3.2 on an Intel card. The video seems jerky and slightly out of sync with the audio only on fullscreen but is fine when in window mode. I downgraded to totem 3.0 and the problem went away. Running fallback mode also fixed the issue. So I suspect that it is the change from Xv to clutter that is causing this problem. Any chance of an option to run totem 3.2 using Xv?