Totem

Drop Channels feature?

Bug #2028016 reported by Jeremy Bícha
22
This bug affects 3 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Totem
New
Unknown
totem (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Ubuntu's default video app, Totem, includes a Channels tab with 3 web video providers:
- Apple Movie Trailers
- Euronews
- Rai.tv

Screenshot attached.

I recommend that we disable this feature because
- These are somewhat obscure video sources

- It can be unexpected to parents, school administrators, etc. for this app to be able to view web content

- Perhaps most importantly, none of these 3 sources seemed to work today in my clean Ubuntu 23.04 install.
+ Apple Movie Trailers worked after I installed the additional media support which is offered in the Ubuntu installer (ubuntu-restricted-addons which specifically installs gstreamer1.0-libav)
+ Based on the errors shown in my terminal, it looks like Euronews either changed their API or it's no longer available.

- If these channels can be broken and we aren't getting bug reports, are people actually even using this feature?

Implementation
--------------
This feature is enabled by some plugins shipped in totem's src/plugins . They can be disabled by the meson build.

Also, totem depends on grilo-plugins-0.3-base which provides supporting files. None of the plugins works if that dependency is removed.

We would then also need to patch Totem to no longer show the Channels page in the Totem app.

See original description
Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

The idea was also suggested upstream on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/totem/-/issues/355

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater)
Changed in totem:
status: Unknown → New
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

The plugins are indeed not working, I've disabled them for mantic now
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grilo-plugins/0.3.16-1.1ubuntu3

One point from upstream is that the channel tab can list local content over dlna which might still we wanted, also removing the channel tab more of an UI change that could impact documentation so that will do for this cycle

Changed in totem (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
Revision history for this message
AsciiWolf (asciiwolf) wrote :

Yeah, none of the online "Channels" work.

When switching to the "Channels" tab and trying to click any of the pre-installed online channels, none of them works:

- Clicking "Rai.tv" and opening on any of the categories causes Totem to crash on SIGSEGV.
- Clicking "Apple Movie Trailers" causes lots of parser errors to be printed on stdout and Totem to hang.
- Clicking "Euronews" displays an empty window.

It would be the best to just remove them, sadly Totem has no active maintainer[1] and is on a basic "life support" now, and grilo-plugins also do not seem to be much active.

Upstream tickets:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/grilo-plugins/-/issues/89
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/grilo-plugins/-/issues/90
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/grilo-plugins/-/issues/91

[1] https://www.hadess.net/2023/08/new-responsibilities.html

Revision history for this message
AsciiWolf (asciiwolf) wrote :

By the way, any chance the broken grilo-plugins could be disabled directly in Debian instead of patching it in Ubuntu?

Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :

In Ubuntu 25.04, the Channels tab is empty unless you happen to have install grilo-plugins-0.3-extra and have a local DLNA server set up (perhaps with dLeyna).

GNOME 49 is likely to switch from Totem to Showtime as the default video player. If we make that switch for Ubuntu Desktop, it might be useful to keep Totem as is in case someone is using that feature.

won't fix (wontfix)
tags: added: noble oracular plucky totem
removed: mantic
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