After messing around with sound, DVD video and other issues, I got to the following Noob conclusion:
Xine rules. GStreamer drools.
Xine would play sound. GStreamer wouldn’t.
Xine player would play rented and encrypted DVDs. Kaffeine wouldn’t until I changed engine from GStreamer to Xine, now it works just fine.
Reading around the forum it seems I’m not the only one. Why would they even bother to ship GStreamer as a default engine ?>:(
I’m an xine engine user myself for openSUSE multimedia applications. I’m also a KDE desktop user.
But I’ve read many gnome users prefer to use gstreamer. It supposedly IS possible to get gstreamer working well. There are many Packman packaged gstreamer apps one can use to replace the Novell/SuSE-GmbH packaged versions, although I’ve also read that is not always the answer.
I just love the way you said it… rotfl! That pretty much sums it up…
Nonetheless, I’m glad Linux had grown so much more mature since I’ve tried it last a couple years ago. Back then I’ve given up with constant crashes, non-working hardware and a major struggle to do pretty much anything. Now, on the same computer, thing went much smoother, and after playing with it for a couple of evenings I actually have a system that does 80% of what’s important for me in Windows, and does it well. I have a working sound system (this was a bit of struggle), I can play DVDs, I can (gusp) watch Youtube videos and my kids can play Shockwave games, I can use Skype, I can print reliably (something that was very iffy in old Ubuntu), I can very easily access files on my NTFS partitions.
I still can’t (1) sync with my PDA (working on it), (2) scan on my Visioneer scanner (SOL, but that’s really Visioneer’s fault), (3) use a syncable financial application.