totem won't do progressive download for flv videos

[bgruber]

Binary package hint: totem

With most online videos, totem will do progressive download, filling up its buffer and then starting playback while it continues to download the rest of the video. For some reason it won't do this with FLV files. It doesn't start playing until the entire video is downloaded.

I first noticed this on YouTube using a greasemonkey script that replaces the flash player with a native plugin. fmt=18 videos, which are mp4, begin playing almost immediately, while fmt=34 or fmt=35, which are flv, do not. I then confirmed it with some other videos. Here's one posted by someone reporting this problem on ubuntuforums: http://hd.spaziogames.eu/hd20/2009/9/psp/4018.flv

I tried it in banshee and it works fine, so this seems to be specific to totem and not gstreamer.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

This bug is an upstream one and it would be quite helpful if somebody experiencing it could send the bug the to the people writing the software. You can learn more about how to do this for various upstreams at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME , if you want to watch youtube videos with totem you can use the youtube plugin, i don't see any point on replacing the flash player with it, anyways this needs to be send upstream, low priority bug.

[bgruber (bgruber)]

added upstream bug.

i know this is off-topic, but as for why i would want to replace the flash player on youtube pages instead of using totem's youtube plugin:

90% of the time when i'm watching a youtube video it's because someone sent me a link to it. There doesn't seem to be a way to feed a youtube link to totem and have it show the video, and even then, to get the same level of convenience we'd have to work it out so that the browser opens totem when clicking on a youtube link, which of course are just http. And I still wouldn't do it if I could, because I prefer using youtube's interface to youtube over totem's for a variety of reasons. Frankly, with the greasemonkey script the youtube experience is pretty great, with the exception of this bug.

to bring this back on-topic: this bug also manifests itself using totem's youtube plugin.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

It does the progressive download for me with the plugin. not confirming your issue here. thanks for sent it upstream.

[bgruber (bgruber)]

>It does the progressive download for me with the plugin.

For what video? How do you know it's one in an FLV container? Totem's YouTube plugin does not, as far as I can tell, allow you to choose which format you get, except indirectly by setting your connection speed. I notice that when I set my connection speed to 512, it won't do progressive download on any of the videos I select, but when I set it to Intranet/LAN, it does. It picks fmt=5 (an FLV container) when set to 512, and fmt=18 (an mp4 container) when set to Intranet.

As an example: the first URL is what I get in totem when I set my connection speed to intranet and do a youtube search for "tron". The second is the first result when I set my connection speed to 512 Kbps. The only difference is the fmt=18 at the end. The first one buffers and plays almost instantly, while the second one does not.

http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=-3ODe9mqoDE&t=vjVQa1PpcFP9ODzDI-Q1VYwCgPGh86toYtHlHFGtGFg%3D&fmt=18

http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=-3ODe9mqoDE&t=vjVQa1PpcFOK2hVl0QlGv6WQBgkJznali8MnU4_ZXxo%3D

In any case, the bug is confirmed upstream.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the issue should be fixed in maverick now