totem warns every time: "Drawing a gadget with negative dimensions. Did you forget to allocate a size? (node slider owner GtkScale)

[John Gilmore]

I am running Ubuntu 20.04 beta amd64 Desktop from the liveCD ISO.

Whenever I run totem from a shell window to play a video, I get on stderr:

  "(totem:13002): Gtk-WARNING **: 07:50:52.916: Drawing a gadget with negative dimensions. Did you forget to allocate a size? (node slider owner GtkScale)"

This has also been happening in totem in Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS for years. I was shocked when I first ran it on 20.04 that apparently nobody else noticed this error. It happens every single time I run totem, as soon as it actually opens a video and starts playing it.

For example, I made a screencast for a few seconds (with Ctl-Alt-Shift-R) and then played it from "totem ~/Videos/Screencast*.webm", and this error came out on stderr.

If I just run "totem &" the error doesn't come out -- until I select a video from totem's interface. Once I pick one and play it, then the error comes out on the terminal screen where I typed the totem command.

Is there supposed to be a slider for scaling the video? That would be a nice feature, but no slider appears, possibly due to this bug...

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: totem 3.34.1-2ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-21.25-generic 5.4.27
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-21-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu22
Architecture: amd64
CasperVersion: 1.442
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Fri Apr 17 07:46:58 2020
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/totem
LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" - Beta amd64 (20200402)
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 LANG=C.UTF-8
 TERM=xterm-256color
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 PATH=(custom, no user)
SourcePackage: totem
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
XorgLog: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/log/Xorg.0.log'

[Janne Säilynkangas (kyyla)]

Happens to me also with a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04LTS.

Also HW acceleration does not work on Totem (choppy playback), not a problem of gstreamer as gst-play plays videos just fine.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[DuckHook (duckhook)]

In my case, in addition to John's GTK warning, the following error is logged in dmesg with every Totem launch:

radeon_dp_aux_transfer_native: 32 callbacks suppressed

And as per Janne's case, also a fresh install, but playback stutters and skips, whereas VLC is fine.