Wanna Clap Control the Totem Media Player in Ubuntu?

Yep, that's actually what you can do thanks to the plugin feature in Totem media player. Although called a media player, Totem actually is only a framework for the Gstreamer or the Xine media player. It's just another simplified GUI that takes user controls such as Play, Pause, etc and convert it into a language that the real media playing engine can understand.

Anyway as I was saying... there is a pretty amazing little script that's written in Python which basically let you "clap" and Play/Pause your Totem player while playing an audio/video file!. So you obviously gonna need a headphone with a microphone connected to the Ubuntu PC and then move to the next paragraph to know how to install it.

1. Open the Totem media player and from its menu go to, "Edit" -> "Plugins". This should bring a small window in which you should "check" that which says "D-Bus Service". See the below screenshot.

2. Now, download the script from here. Now right click on the downloaded file called "install.py" and choose "Preferences". Under "Permissions" tab check/enable "Allow execute file as program" command.

3. Now double click on the "install.py" file which should bring a message as shown below.

When you click the "OK" button that would bring another window asking you to make a loud "Clap" so the application can record it. Make sure to Clap few times (with little intervals) and then click "OK".

4. Now you'll see a conformation dialog-box saying that the application is now "installed". Click "OK" again and you're done.

5. Open Totem and play something. Make sure the microphone is connected and make a reasonably loud "Clap" and see what happens!.

*. Note - Not just a "Clap" actually, when asked you can create any unique sound you like (yelling would also work :D). Just make sure you can make that sound again. From now on, you can Clap the heck out of Totem!, Enjoy.