[Edit: Damn, the title was supposed to be "A better looking Totem"]

I figured II testing/discussion would be the best place for this, since it might break things:

Although some people are die-hard mplayer fans, and others still, swear by VLC; for me, Totem is the best option for movies: a quick and simple way to play a video, with good format support (through GStreamer) and some useful features like a YouTube plug-in.

Until now, I had one big criticism I lived with ... the UI.

User Interface has also been a huge deal with me, and no one ever seems to get it just right. It's nobody's fault -- it's all about personal preference -- and as I said, I can live with it. Anyway, 1f40 I've been looking at the UI's of different apps, making some mockups of what I like (e.g., an evolution one in the Cafe) ... but it's a nice bonus when you find something perfect for you that actually exists ...

I'll attach a screenshot of this, made by some genius (not sarcasm ) [Edit: His name is Alexander V. Butenko] -- it's not a mockup.

It makes a few changes:

• The unspeakably awful (and strangely omnipresent) "sidebar"-button, is gone. Vanished. Hit F9 if you want to view the Sidebar.
• "Time:" has been removed. Why was this even needed?
• And everything is on a single line, so it looks neater.

OK, I said it was perfect for me, and I lied: it still doesn't let me hide the status bar (seriously, every other app can do this! Even the Log Viewer!!), but it's a huge improvement.
What do you think?

personally im a fan of gnome-mplayer, thought the version in the repos is fairly old so i compile it.

It's already there. You can untick the "show controls" box, and have, well, "a mini-mode where the UI get's hidden, but it is still in a window".

as soon as i start playing a video i just hit F11 and make it full screen. therefore the GUI does not matter too much.

maybe a mini-mode would be good (like rhythmbox). where most of the UI gets hidden, but it is still in a window.

I've done that a few times, the "hide controls" and "always on top" do make it nice to tuck out of the way.

Here's another one:

Its not really the best because it lacks features the others have. Such as being able to run a deinterlacing filter for non progressive footage. Also, there is bugs in totem such as is not correctly switching audio tracks when a user selects too.

I use totem because I want to support Ubuntu and contribute to testing.

Oddly, given that I am finicky about UI's totem's doesn't offend me much, probably because most of the time when I use the program its not there, I just use the hide option to have just the video window.Makes things nice and neat, and I can plop it out of th way in a corner and get on with the important business of web browsing