Bug#1037307: totem: Gnome Video refuses to start complaining about missing important plugin.

[Abou Al Montacir]

Hi Simon,

Thank you for looking at this. 

On Tue, 2024-10-22 at 20:58 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> Control: severity -1 important
> Control: tags -1 + moreinfo unreproducible
> 
> On Sat, 10 Jun 2023 at 23:40:38 +0200, Abou Al Montacir wrote:
> > After installing Bookworm on my computer (kept my home from Bullseye), I
> > can't
> > start any video/audio file using Gnome Video.
> 
> Do you still see a similar problem with the Debian 12 stable release?
No I managed to fix it.
> Do you perhaps have a local copy of the GStreamer libraries in /usr/local
> or ~/.local or some similar location, that could be interfering with
> detection of the plugins provided by Debian?
No I did not have a copy but I've fond a workaround, so the severity can be
lowered.

On Sat, 2023-06-10 at 23:40 +0200, Abou Al Montacir wrote:
> ...
> After installing Bookworm on my computer (kept my home from Bullseye), I can't
> start any video/audio file using Gnome Video.
This is confirmed that it is a bug related to upgrade.
> 
> The program displays the following error message and dies when clicking OK.
> 
>                             Video cloud not startup
> Some necessary plug-ins are missing. Make sure that the program is correctly
> installed.
> 
>                                        OK
This error message is really useless. Please provide more information about the
error.
Many peoples do not have the reflex to run the program in a console window.

Also the GUI name (Gnome Video) an the executable name (totem) are so different
that one needs to guess it using ps or dumping the icon file.
So finding the below messages requires an experimented user, which is probably
not the case of all Debian users.
> On the console it logs:
> 
> ** (totem:1676241): WARNING **: 23:38:30.454: Element 'gtkglsink' is missing,
> verify your installation
> 
> ** (totem:1676241): WARNING **: 23:38:30.454: Element 'glsinkbin' is missing,
> verify your installation
> ...
I've checked on an other computer, freshly installed and without any home data,
and it works.
This is not surprising, otherwise the package would not reached the new stable.

I've then checked on the very same computer and the very same user to run totem
with HOME=/some/other/path and that also worked.

Now, I did a grep on all the home folder looking for 'gtkglsink' and 'glsinkbin'
but no luck.
I turned my efforts to decode the logs of strace totem and then I discovered
that it reads ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0/registry.x86_64.bin.
Renaming this file solved the issue. (removing it also would have worked)

So the workaround would be to rename/remove ~/.cache/gstreamer-
1.0/registry.x86_64.bin.
This can probably be suggested by the error message.
-- 
Cheers,
Abou Al Montacir

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-gnome-maintainers/attachments/20241022/1c0c0896/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 228 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-gnome-maintainers/attachments/20241022/1c0c0896/attachment-0001.sig>