Thursday, January 3, 2013

MP4 video doesn't play in Totem on Debian Wheezy

This is an issue I noted when I first tried Debian Wheezy. Tonight my daughter was fixated on watching "Five Little Monkeys", which of course just happened to be an MP4 file. Totem wouldn't play it. I downloaded VLC and that would, but later I decided to see if I could track down the problem.

I found this post on the Ubuntu forum pointing to a Launchpad bug: it seems the problem has been fixed in Ubuntu. I don't know how quickly bug fixes make their way from Ubuntu to Debian, but at least there are some workarounds available: the easiest one obviously being to install VLC.


1 comment:

  1. Without wanting to install VLC, one can fix this by:

    (32bit)
    sudo mv /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideoparsersbad.so /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideoparsersbad.so.bak

    (64bit)
    sudo mv /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideoparsersbad.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideoparsersbad.so.bak

    Then Totem should play mp4s fine.

    Shocked that this bug (it's gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad I think) is still around to be honest.

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