Five years ago most computers were not fast enough to watch a DVD without using special video chips. Today, the typical home computer has enough processing power to run several videos at once while ripping songs off a CD and searching for extraterrestrial life when it gets bored (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu). You can even turn your computer into a TiVo-like device using software included with video capture cards or high-end graphics cards.
But even though your hardware is powerful enough for almost any video chore, the software to actually watch videos isn't always as capable as you'd like. The reasons for this are many and varied, but I'll point out one reason that applies to Linux particularly.
As discussed in the previous section, multimedia files are encoded using special software that allows you to create small files while still maintaining most of the quality of the original media. To play back the encoded video, you use a special program called a decoder . There are dozens of video encoders and decoders, but most of them are not open source and cannot be distributed without paying a license fee. As a result, Linux is limited in its ability to play back some formats that can be easily played on Windows or a Macintosh, for example, the latest versions of Windows Media Videos (.wmv files) and some types of QuickTime videos (.mov files).
In addition to playing MP3 and Ogg music files, Totem plays back videos. Think of it as the Linux equivalent of the Windows Media Player, your one-stop program for almost all of your multimedia needs. To play a video in Move, just double-click its file icon. If Totem can handle it, it will open the file automatically and begin playing. If you can't see the video, try resizing the window vertically, as sometimes the video window portion of the player is hidden.
The Totem window itself looks exactly the same as it does when playing music, so there are no surprises here. Press F to toggle between full screen and windowed video. Another neat thing you can do is to take a screenshot of your video by going to Edit→ Take Screenshot. Unfortunately, this works only while the movie is playing, not paused, so you have to time your selection just right.
The Totem application is actually just a pretty GUI frontend for the open source video playing program xine—the real work of playing the video files is being done by xine and the codecs (video decoders) that it loads. There are several frontends for xine; Figure 4-5 shows another popular one.
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