totem-xine and playing nice with esound

22 May 2005

Totem is great, but adding plugins via its brilliant drag-and-drop-couldn’t-be-easier “Add Proprietary Plugins” interface does absolutely nothing if you’re using the totem-gstreamer version (the default that ships with Ubuntu). Switching to totem-xine makes the playback with these plugins possible, but potentially introduces problems of its own.

The inbuilt configuration of Totem is pretty poor, but thankfully there’s a way around it. The actual configuration exists in a hidden folder in your home directory – for me, this is /home/josh/.gnome2/ – the file you’re looking for is totem_config

For me, it was simply a case of uncommenting audio.driver and setting it to “esd” (audio.driver:esd) – but depending on what distribution and sound server you’re using, YMMV.

Anyway, Totem now works great, and I have cooler visualisations than gstreamer’s!