totem cannot play h.264 on 18.04

[Jay S.]

On a fresh install of 18.04, Totem fails to play recent h.264 video (audio is fine). Obviously, that means failed thumbnails, too.

I have the whole set of gstreamer plugins installed (version 1.14.0-1ubuntu1), including the libav plugin.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME. If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about its status. Thanks in advance.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Did you try on one of several files? Did they use to play on previous Ubuntu version? Would it be possible to attach a file example or give an url to download one?

[Jay S. (jurgen-schellaert)]

It appears to affect several h.264 encoded videos I have. I have recently purchased a number of course videos consisting each of individual clips - and none of those will play. They do play in VLC and SMPlayer so I assume the clips are fine.

As for precedents, I cannot think of any. It is true I have had the occasional h.264 video failing to render as a thumbnail (I believe that started around 16.04) - but those were exceptions and it did did not prevent those videos from playing. Now I get neither thumbnails nor playback so it is worse. And it affects many more videos, too.

As requested, I have added a clip that is affected by the bug.

[Will Cooke (willcooke)]

I've tested that clip here and was asked to install the "bad" codecs which I did, and then restarted Totem and it played back ok.

That video clip appears a bit strange, in that it's h264 video and mp4 aac audio inside an MPEG2 TS.

Do you have Nvidia graphics hardware?

[Jay S. (jurgen-schellaert)]

Yes, Nvidida indeed. 750 GTX in one system, 970 GTX in the other one.

Oddly enough, the videos now play for me as well ...

I guess that would confirm your suspicions about the video hardware. My apt history shows that libnvidia-390 was updated only three days ago. I would not be surprised if it contained the fix that was needed.

I think we can call this one solved.

Thanks for the assistance!

[Will Cooke (willcooke)]

Cool, thanks for the update! We'll keep an eye on this problem as we've seen other reports, but for now closing this bug.