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

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.

Solution 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.

Solution 2:

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