Is it possible to completly remove Ubuntu's video player "totem"?

Question

To watch videos, I use Mplayer, which works great. But Ubuntu insists on playing every video file it encounters with "Totem", which I guess is a video player.

I use linux primarily on my laptop, and often on travels, where I have no internet access. All Totem does is launch, and say "should I look for a codec ?", and I have to click no before I can close it.

I know that I can choose "Open with mplayer" for various video formats, but every so often I'll have a file with a different extension, and there comes totem.

I do not seem to be able to remove it from my system, which really infuriates me. I left Windows to avoid programs that you cannot remove. :(

EDIT: If I can't remove it, I'd be happy with a solution to make all video files play with mplayer. I don't want to configure "play with mplayer" for every single file extension there is.

Answer 1

It's in the repositories under totem-gstreamer and totem-common, so you should be able to do it with:

sudo apt-get remove totem-gstreamer totem-common

Or by going into your favourite package manager and deselecting it there.

It looks like there's a dummy "totem" package that installs it all nicely, but for some reason in my installation of xubuntu it wasn't installed by default, so a sudo apt-get remove totem would just return "Package totem is not installed, so not removed"

Edit:
Updated the above to also remove totem-common, which it leaves behind.

Answer 2

Does it work to go to "Preferences"/"Preferred Applications", choose the "Multimedia"-tab and change the default "Multimedia Player"?

Answer 3

Look into just resetting the file association for any video type files. This works exactly how you would expect it to and this way you can leave totem but choose your player. This article explains it step by step.

Ubuntu File associations

Answer 4

If —as implied but I am not that sure that it is indeed so— part of your problem is really that totem does not play your video files, then once when having an internet connection, try to play them and answer Yes to the questions about installing needed software. From then on, it will play your files.

UPDATE: suggested course of action, to be done once; open a console and copy-paste the following:

sudo aptitude install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg \
  gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad \
  gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-schroedinger

Please let me know if this does not cover all files you have.