If you are using Debian or Ubuntu, and installed the Gnome system by default. Your system probably already has Gnome Volume Manager.

The Gnome Volume Manger is a daemon which listens the hardware events (HAL event), and run the user-configurable commands. Basiclly, it do autorun, automount for the hot-plugged devices. In plain English, it run the Multimedia Player or CD Burning software when you put a CD into the cdrom driver.

The default command for vcd player is “totem %m“, which is the default setting of the Gnome Volume Manager in Debian and Ubuntu. However, totem does not recognize ‘%m’, %m means mount point. The “%m” variable works for DVD disc but not VCD. You need to play VCD by assigning the “vcd://” url with device name for totem. All you need to do is changing the command to right syntax which totem accept or you can also just replace as another movie player.

The difficult part is there is no GUI for changing the VCD auto play command setting, but you can change the DVD auto-play setting with “gnome-volume-properties” command.

The user have to config the setting for VCD auto-play command via GConf configuration system. The key name of vcd auto-play command is “/desktop/gnome/volume_manager/autoplay_vcd_command“, you could launch the “gconf-editor” to modify it.

You can just change the value to “totem vcd:///dev/cdrom” or “totem vcd://%d“.

These special variables means

• %d means device node name,
• %m means mount point name,
• %h means HAL UDI.

You can also specify your favorite player for it.

Another quick way for changing the setting is using gconftool, Ex:

gconftool -s /desktop/gnome/volume_manager/autoplay_vcd_command -t string “totem vcd:///dev/cdrom”

Enjoy your Gnome system. 😉