totem-gstreamer not ready for primetime

Well, my troubles with gstreamer-ffmpeg were resolved quite quickly by a new version hitting Debian unstable. However, I ran into other troubles.

Apparently, gstreamer-ffmpeg can't load DLLs itself, a capability needed to play some proprietary formats like RealAudio (needed for NPR online clips). There is an experimental plugin for gstreamer that will load DLLs, but it doesn't have a Debian package. Grr...

But the really big problem was serious audio-video sync issues. In normal playing, the video would be about a quarter of a second ahead of the audio; slight, but very noticeable when watching subtitled sequences with karaoke effects. Then, even worse, upon jumping in the stream, video and audio could get as far as a couple seconds out of sync. Totally unusable...

I was stuck with totem-gstreamer through the weekend, though, because of a library issues between libxine1 and the new X.org packages. However, those were resolved by yesterday's update of unstable, and now I'm back to totem-xine.

I guess the point I'm making is that totem-gstreamer is definitely not ready for the primetime yet.