gstreamer bug in Ubuntu and a temporary fix

Off late I found that some of the movies that I downloaded from the internet played really wierd . The quality of the movie was good but the colors seem to be distorted and there used to be a green band . Look at the pics below . The one in the left is how the actual movie is supposed to be and the one in the right is how it appears.

Few things I tried out to fix this :

1. I thought it was the problem with the video i downloaded because not all videos had this prolem . So I tried using mencoder to convert to other formats and fix the video . Didn’t work

2. Tried re-downloading and changing my torrent managers . Miserably failed

3. Tried playing in all sorts of different player . All of them had the same problem . Now I was sure it was not a problem with the codecs used nor the player.

4. Booted in windows and tried playing . Worked perfectly fine. So I was sure the problem was still with Linux .

In the mean time I had deleted a couple of movies because I really got irritated because of the problem .

This is when  googling struck me and I found out about the gstreamer bug .  GStreamer is a library for constructing graphs of media-handling components. The applications it supports range from simple Ogg/Vorbis playback, audio/video streaming to complex audio (mixing) and video (non-linear editing) processing.

Tried meddling with the properties of gstreamer from the command line . No effect

Finally did the following

sudo apt-get remove totem-gstreamer

sudo apt-get install totem-xine gxine

Yippe !!! All videos worked fine with the new players using the xine engine . I hope they get to the bug fix soon . Mean while you can log your complaints at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357741  and please mention any fixes you get to know . One of them involving changing gstreamer properties seems to work for some .