Playing video on Sugar startup with VMETA

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

We're trying to make XO-1.75s play quality video on Sugar startup. Our
solution involves installing the VMETA software on 12.1.0 and then
loading the video in Totem using the Welcome activity hook in Sugar.

As this is for marketing/instructional purposes, we need the process
to be really slick:

  1. XO loads with fully graphical boot animation (no console)
  2. video loads and plays, with no chrome (toolbars, sidebars, etc.),
high quality, full frame rate and complete A/V sync
  3. Sugar loads as normal

What we've found is that Totem segfaults when invoked with
--fullscreen. It doesn't crash when loaded in a window, but there's so
much chrome that it looks silly. Even a simpler gstreamer-based
player, gst123, crashes soon after startup. I'm of the understanding
that we need to be using a gstreamer player.

Is there anything that we can do to improve our present situation?



Sridhar Dhanapalan
Engineering Manager
One Laptop per Child Australia