From LinuxReviews

Totem is a excellent media player based on the Xine-backend and the Gnome user-interface.

[edit] Sweet features

• Xine can play pretty much any audio/video file format, which means Totem also plays just about everything.
• Totem has excellent playlist support, where as Xine's own playlist implementation is.. well, to put it lightly: not very good.
  • The playlist can be played in shuffle mode
• Totem supports drag and drop from both Gnome (Nautilous etc) and KDE (Konqueror etc) file-managers.

[edit] Not so sweet?

It's Gnome. So it has the Gnome file dialog box. This means:

• The file dialog box is totally crappy.
  • It takes hours to just open a folder with huge number of files (So if you put all the music files beginning with A in a folder A/ then it takes hours to open folder A/)
  • You can't delete files (or do anything) from the file dialog box. You also can't delete files from Totem. So if you want to listen to a bunch of new files and remove those you don't like then Totem isn't for you.

Also,

• The volume control is limited to up and down (no panning left/right)
• Totem can not open streams. It does have an option "Movie -> Open Location", but entering both audio and video stream URLs there does not work.
• Totem has limited DVD-support: It can play a DVD - as long as it is in your DVD-rom. Totem can not play ISO images, DVD images stored on your harddrive and so on.
• Totem has almost no user-preferences. (It's GNOME, so no configuration should be expected; GNOME means easy-to-use by allowing you absolutely no features or options)

[edit] Official story

• Totem's website

[edit] The Linuxreviews Verdict

Totem is the best and also the most user-friendly overall media player available for Linux. It does lack some of the most basic features you would expect from a media player, but hey. It's GNOME, so you can't expect that much.