The wmv format can't be played by the default installation anyway, that's a non free format. You are welcome to open a bug about the CPU intensive problem, though corrupted or partial files look like a corner case and we will not pick the default player according to that. You point totem for the subtitle use, switching to totem-xine will not likely make a real difference there.
We don't agree with you than gstreamer has not improved yet. The previous gstreamer0.8 use to not behave nicely, many people find gstreamer0.10 working as fine or better that xine on a lot of files now. You can have a look to the xine-lib crashers list if you want, there is many example where xine is crashing and gstreamer behaves better. The gstreamer upstream hackers are also really responsive and doing a great job at maintaining it, fixing bugs and make it work better. We are not likely to change to xine by default because there is not a lot to win doing that. The best way to get gstreamer better quickly is to point the problem you find with it so they can get fixed -- Make totem-xine the default for totem https://launchpad.net/bugs/78985 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
