Mike DeMarco wrote: > Why has Totem been selected as the default player for Solaris? > > It has never worked out of the box yet it is included with Solaris builds. > > mplayer, ogle, VLC, xine all work well and yet we get Totem? > > WHY? > > > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org > Totem uses the gstreamer backend and is a native GNOME application, while mplayer and xine are thorny issues for legal reasons in many cases. Building VLC has never been too successful on Solaris. I haven't seen hardly anyone using ogle for a long time. Xine integrates horribly with the theming, and MPlayer's gui is not a default option, nor is it supported like one would need it to be. Sun's accessibility, marketing, legal and usability teams are reasons Totem have been selected. Many Linux distributions continue to provide Totem, and Totem's supposedly lacking attributes are due to lack of inclusion of patented gstreamer codecs. The Fluendo service provides licensed gstreamer codecs. For business adoption, inclusion of Xine and MPlayer are not an option. Providing them through an alternate repository is a must but it has not been made available yet through any Sun channels. MPlayer and Xine can also be construed as being non-native in terms of engineering as they are not first class citizens, which cannot be supported as well due to library and compiler requirements. GNOME/GTK+ based applications written in C when compiled using the Sun Studio compilers can maintain parity with GCC dependencies and toolchain requirements due to ABI compatibility while C++ applications depend on all supportive infrastructure inclusive to internal build process must also be able to compile under both build environments. Status of i18n, accessibility, legal, and usability are of utmost importance to Sun's inclusion processes as well. The commonly used versions of Xine and MPlayer depend on Blastwave which was designed for Solaris 10 with support as a result of binary compatibility for OpenSolaris, but natively compiled versions done on the intended distribution platform are an issue which still has many hits and misses.
James
