Totem refuses to decode videos not supported by vaapi, Nautilus crashes

[Peter Würtz]

I tried installing gstreamer0.10-vaapi for gpu accelerated video decoding. Generally, vaapi works but it only supports mpeg2, h264 and vc1. So one would guess that a video application should just fall back to the standard decoders when trying to play an unsupported video.

Totem seems to have trouble with this. First, the thumbnailer isnt working for non-vaapi videos:

$ /usr/bin/totem-video-thumbnailer -j no-vaapi-support.mp4 test.png
libva: VA-API version 0.32.0
Xlib: extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0".
libva: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva: va_openDriver() returns 0
totem-video-thumbnailer: 'no-vaapi-support.mp4' isn't thumbnailable
Reason: Media contains no supported video streams.

Another problem is that when opening the properties for unsupported videos in nautilus the application just freezes and crashes.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: libgstreamer0.10-0 0.10.36-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-26.41-generic 3.2.19
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-26-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu8
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Jul 15 12:12:51 2012
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gstreamer0.10
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[madbiologist (me-again)]

This should be fixed in gstreamer-vaapi version 0.5.3, released 18 April 2013. It contains the patch "Fix fallback to sofware decoding if no hardware decoder is available". Also, gstreamer-vaapi version 0.3.7, released 26 June 2012, contained the patch "Fix vaapidecode to report unsupported codec profiles".