totem fails to play video if gstreamer-vaapi is installed

[Timo Aaltonen]

If gstreamer-vaapi is installed Totem fails to play anything, and instead just shows an error popup saying "GStreamer encountered a general stream error". The app doesn't produce any error msg on the terminal, but shows that vaapi is being used:
...
(totem:8470): Grilo-WARNING **: [registry] grl-registry.c:472: Could not open plugins' info directory '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/grilo-0.2': Error opening directory '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/grilo-0.2': No such file or directory

(totem:8470): Totem-WARNING **: Failed to load grilo plugins: All configured plugin paths are invalid
libva info: VA-API version 0.37.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/i965_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_0_36
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0

(totem:8470): Gtk-WARNING **: Symbolic icon view-sidebar-symbolic-ltr of size 16 is in an icon theme directory of size 128
...

Gst-launch using vaapidecocde and vaapisink still works properly, using

gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=bbb_sunflower_2160p_60fps_normal.mp4 ! qtdemux ! vaapidecode ! vaapisink

takes 6% cpu instead of 300% on my broadwell based laptop.

video downloaded from here http://bbb3d.renderfarming.net/download.html

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

this prevents enabling vaapi distro-wide, bumping importance accordingly

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Michel-Ekimia (michel.ekimia)]

Any other default gstreamer player we could use instead before this is fixed ?

[TomasHnyk (sup)]

I am working a lot with videos using a gstreamer based subtitle editor called subtitleeditor (compiled from upstream, ubuntu's version is horribly outdated) and it can play the videos, but with terrible performace (lots of stuttering, sometimes it skips 30 frames or even more before continuing to play). Removing gstreamer-vaapi solves it too.

[TomasHnyk (sup)]

i.e. I am not sure this bug is specific to clutter, subtitleeditor does not use it (it might be badly programmed, but as far as I know this does not happen on Fedora).

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

bad performance is something else then, this is about clutter-gst not being able to even set up the stream

[Éric Piel (pieleric)]

Seems to be same bug as bug #1373978 and bug #1397597.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

this seems to work in wily, at least with totem

[Numan Demirdöğen (if.gnu.linux)]

I can confirm that @Eric Piel is right saying that gstreamer1.0-vaapi is the culprit. Without gstreamer1.0-vaapi, I can play example.mp4 file in bug #1373978 without any problem.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

this is fixed in xenial

[Davide Capodaglio (davidecapod)]

Totem still fails for me to play almost anything (but something works, strange) on xenial with vaapi.
When it does not work, it shows the video length, start playing the first seconds with black screen, and then stops there.
On the console I see

libva info: VA-API version 0.39.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_0_39
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0

(totem:4934): Cogl-WARNING **: driver/gl/cogl-buffer-gl.c:93: GL error (1280): Invalid enumeration value