Friday, November 16, 2007

HOWTO: Get more visualizations in Totem/Rhythmbox

After 4 years, I finally got sick of GOOM and decided to figure out how to get more visualizers in Totem and Rhythmbox.

This looks really trippy when it's in motion


Turns out all you need to do is install the libvisual-0.4-plugins package through Synaptic. Piece of cake.

In Gutsy this buys you eight more visualizers, although I was hoping for more than that*. I feel the urge to write a cool visualizer one day, seems like a good weekend project.

* I was hoping that it'd be like installing xscreensaver-gl-extra and xscreensaver-data-extra, where you get a ton of really funky new screensavers.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

I installed them and started rythymbox back up and all i had was goom.. ?

Anonymous said...

you could also install projectm (easiest way would be to built it from debian's source packages).
there is also a visualization called g-force which was stripped from debian/ubuntu due to a licensing issue (hobbyist users only for personal use). you could build it from the source package i made for it.
http://mirror.randumb.org/darkmagez/libvisual-plugins-gforce/

If you get around to writing a music visualization for libvisual then please contact me as i would be happy to test it and possibly add it to debian/ubuntu.
(irc.freenode.net as DarkMageZ)

to anonymous in the above comment. close down all gstreamer based applications and then remove the folder called .gstreamer-0.10 from your home directory. then try again. have fun.

Anonymous said...

you need to install libvisual 0.4.0-dev as well as libvisual 0.4.0-plugins

Unknown said...

thanks for the tipoff i to was getting bored of goom , maybe it should have been 'goom what a missed oportunity'.

anyway this worked well for me in 64bit hardy , i didn't need the dev package.
The dropdown doesn't make it clear
that there are new plugins , scroll it.
jess is excellent but oinksie crashed.

Toodle-pip
Amias
[blog][www][ecotalk]

Anonymous said...
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Jessica S. said...

Thanks for the useful information! Yayyy

Unknown said...

hey everyone I installed both packages and I still find only Goom.
I'm using ubuntu dapper, and installed libvisual-0.4-plugins without problems but still don't have the other visualisations

Anonymous said...

I've started a visualization project which i've just packaged up for hardy. The homepage is at
http://alofts.co.uk/visualkit

Anonymous said...

You good programmers writing visualizers and practically operating systems in a weekend. It takes me 2 weeks just to make a Pac Man game in SDL. =P

dachande said...

if you installed libvisual-0.4.0 and libvisual-0.4.0-plugins and you still have only GOOM available, delete/rename the .gstreamer-0.10 folder in your home directory. On the next restart of rhythmbox, this folder get's recreated thus making libvisual plugins available in rhythmbox. Unfortunatly only non-opengl visuals will be available since gstreamer doesn't support opengl plugins (like projectm). So you won't get these to work in rhythmbox even if you install the libvisual-projectm package.

Si said...

sorry f im being dumb, but i don't know if this has worked! with rhythmbox 0.13.3 i dont see anywhere where a list of viz plugins would BE. I have only window or fullscreen for the viz and there's no configurable menu anywhere. I may not have installed the plugins correctly, would that hide the list field?
cheers
dez

Si said...

(going off the 2005 rhythmbox screenshot, hence wondering if things have changed!)

Si said...

in lieu of a response so far, ppl might want to try fische: install from software centre & run from command line. Deets here:
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/natty/man1/fische.1.html

Fanen Ahua said...

In current rhythmbox, the visualization tab shows just below the playlists. It looks just like a playlist entry.

You need to enable the plugin for visualizations first, if it isn't already enabled.