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22.04 LTS upgrade two days ago from a fully-upgraded and maintained original 18.04.2 install from ISO in 2019.

During upgrade I did receive several warning popups; can't recall the text now because I clicked "report" and the upgrade continued. The warnings were pretty generic.

At any attempt to run any video, or even just start Totem, fails with "Totem could not startup (sic). Some necessary plugins are missing. Make sure that the program is correctly installed."

VLC Media Player doesn't even get that far: simply nothing happens.

This lead down several deep rabbit holes: 1) which plugins are missing? 2) where are they in the file system? 3) what source would provide those plugins; etc etc

Ended up removing and reinstalling Totem. No joy. That led down another rabbit hole where I ended up with

sudo apt install ./totem-plugins_42.0-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb

in an attempt to install missing plugins; still no joy.

Want to post this w/out reading other similar posts because they seem to refer to Totem installs that do work to some degree, or wander off into Window Media Player or something.

How can a plain-jane 22.04 LTS upgrade to a fully-maintained, original Ubuntu 18.04.2 ISO install get b0rked so badly?

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6
  • 1
    Ubuntu 18.04 LTS doesn't have a supported upgrade to 22.04 LTS except via other releases (ie. all releases, or all LTS releases at a minimum). If you upgraded from 18.04 to 22.04 LTS then you've used non-standard upgrade hacks and problems should have been expected. If you did upgrade using upgrade tools; you should make it clear as your wording implies a unsupported upgrade path was used, in which case I'd suggest re-installing (if it's a desktop system you can do this without losing files & having Ubuntu repo. package auto-reinstall)
    – guiverc
    Aug 14, 2022 at 13:23
  • The original 18.04 install was off an ISO. It has been fully upgraded and maintained by Ubuntu's own maintenance/upgrade cycle, per Ubuntu's maintenance notifications. Not sure how this translates into "non-standard upgrades and hacks". No hacks were used anywhere, at any time, in the maintenance cycle of the original ISO install.
    – FinchHaven
    Aug 14, 2022 at 13:36
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    May I ask why you downloaded the deb file rather than using sudo apt update and sudo apt install totem-plugins totem-plugins-extra
    – mchid
    Aug 14, 2022 at 13:36
  • OK. I freely admit I was not taking notes. The deb download was part of that whole "rabbit hole" issue that lead no where. So: "sudo apt update" "All packages are up to date." "sudo apt install totem-plugins" "totem-plugins is already the newest version (42.0-1ubuntu1)." "sudo apt install totem-plugins-extra" "E: Unable to locate package totem-plugins-extra"
    – FinchHaven
    Aug 14, 2022 at 13:43
  • Yes, I see that the extra package is no longer a separate package. sudo apt install totem-plugins should do it.
    – mchid
    Aug 14, 2022 at 13:44

4 Answers 4

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12

I faced this very issue right after the upgrade. After removing ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0, the problem went away.

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4

Totem started silently crashing on my Ubuntu 22.04 after an Nvidia driver update. This fix worked for me:

  • sudo apt purge gstreamer1.0-vaapi
  • rm -r ~/.cache/totem
  • rm -r ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0/
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1
  • first two didn't apply to me but removing the gstreamer cache fixed my issue, I had recently tested installing and subsequently removed the nvidia drivers
    – Arno
    Nov 2, 2023 at 16:08
1

I had the exactly same problem. Tried everything advised in this thread, but nothing worked. Only after I installed VLC Player, was I able to finally run video files.

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1

I would suggest installing the totem plugins using the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install totem-plugins

Also, the ubuntu-restricted-extras package is often required for codecs but not everything is completely open source so it's not included by default. 9 times out of 10, when video doesn't play, it's because this package isn't installed. You can run the following to install this package:

sudo apt install --install-recommends ubuntu-restricted-extras ubuntu-restricted-addons

You can read more about it here at the Ubuntu help docs.

Additionally, the extra gstreamer plugins often help when something is missing or you can't play video:

sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-base

Another plugin is the gstreamer1.0-plugin-ugly which "might pose distribution problems" although, I've never had an issue.

You can read the description of a package by using apt-cache show like in the following example:

apt-cache show gstreamer1.0-plugins-good

You can also use apt-cache search to locate available packages and grep to filter the results (search for "gstreamer1.0" packages containing the word "plugin"):

apt-cache search gstreamer1.0 | grep -i plugins

the -i option for grep disables case sensitivity.

Alternatively, you can search available packages on https://packages.ubuntu.com However, you should not download packages from this website as they are available through your package manager (see above).

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  • OK: "sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras" "Need to get 0 B/370 kB of archives. After this operation, 1,110 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y" And that completes successfully. But I'm still getting "Some necessary plugins are missing" from Totem. I hate to say this, but do I need to reboot or something magical? [ducks...]
    – FinchHaven
    Aug 14, 2022 at 13:57
  • Yeah, certainly give a reboot a try. Before that, however, I updated the command to install some recommended packages, including some gstreamer plugins (often used by multiple media players). I will also update some additional instructions for even more extra media plugins.
    – mchid
    Aug 14, 2022 at 14:01
  • OK. Replying to your update. "sudo apt install --install-recommends ubuntu-restricted-extras ubuntu-restricted-addons" returns: "ubuntu-restricted-addons is already the newest version (26). ubuntu-restricted-addons set to manually installed. ubuntu-restricted-extras is already the newest version (67). 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded." Gonna try a reboot. Thanks for your help!
    – FinchHaven
    Aug 14, 2022 at 14:08
  • OK. Rebooted. Straight-up tried VLC Player and nothing. Tried running Totem from the command line, and this: "totem" "** (totem:3165): WARNING **: 07:24:38.313: Element 'gtkglsink' is missing, verify your installation ** (totem:3165): WARNING **: 07:24:38.314: Element 'glsinkbin' is missing, verify your installation. (totem:3165): GStreamer-CRITICAL **: 07:25:03.853: gst_bus_set_flushing: assertion 'GST_IS_BUS (bus)' failed (totem:3165): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 07:25:03.853: g_object_set: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed" And... gonna go make breakfast...
    – FinchHaven
    Aug 14, 2022 at 14:38
  • gtkglsink is provided by gstreamer1.0-plugins-good and glsinkbin is provided by gstreamer1.0-plugins-base which is a dependency of gstreamer1.0-plugins-good
    – mchid
    Mar 29 at 0:22

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