Totem, Gstreamer and the Firefox Plugin.

*edited*
These days the internet is filled with multimedia. Some may criticize companies like youtube and google videos for using flash for video which is closed source & spec... but lets look at the current release of Ubuntu which is Edgy Eft for a moment here.

Lets take http://www.firefoxflicks.com/ as an example (I'm fairly sure they won't mind the free advertising and used bandwidth). If you load that up in Ubuntu Edgy Eft's Firefox under an almost default install with the exception of some Codec's you gathered from wiki.ubuntu.com/RestrictedFormats .If you load up any of the videos there on a low bandwidth connection (please remember a lot of the world is still on sub 2mbit connections...) then the totem-firefox plugin sits there with no real indication on what it is doing. It's buffering the video!, but there's no visual representation of it. If you hit play before you have enough of it buffered and then the buffer runs out, it gets really skippy and dodgy instead of waiting until there is a reasonable about of it buffered again.

When the video finishes and if you want to watch it again, try hitting the play/pause button... nope, nothing. try moving the slider and hitting the button... nope, nothing, you have to refresh the entire page!.
Now compare the above to lets say youtube or Windows Media Player 9 or higher.
You know who wins.
(The Totem plugin code from the Totem developers is not responsible for this problem as they have clearly stated on their own website "http://www.gnome.org/projects/totem/" that the plugin is not ready for general use. "Mozilla (Firefox) plugin to view movies inside your browser (in development)" )


Totem/Gstreamer themselves aren't perfect either.
For those of you who have dvd players in your systems and have dvd movies, even if you do have the correct plugins installed & decss. If you insert a dvd and don't let totem autoplay it then if you open totem and click on “play disc moviename” in the movie menu that the movie will not play! (https://launchpad.net/bugs/69968).

If you try and play a file which makes Gstreamer crash then totem itself will crash. Now I cannot blame Gstreamer for this, there are sooo many crappy weird variations of how files are encoded that it's not funny... totem shouldn't just crash tho, an error message is much more appropriate in these sorts of situations. What is even worse is that if the totem plugin is being used in firefox and totem goes down, well I've seen it take firefox down with it along with all my other tabs.