Tonight, while tracking down an issue with another video file that wouldn't play in Ubuntu 8.04, but would in anything else -- I discovered yet-another-quirk about the Fluendo codec megabundle, this time with the H.264 codec.
Attempting to play a movie on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 8.04, in Totem with the fluendo codecs installed brought up a black screen with a properties dialog that looked like:
By fresh -- I mean fresh, this box was a demo to show a new user how easy multimedia was (after successfully demonstrating how easy the printer was to set up using CUPS), it has only got the standard installation of Ubuntu, no multiverse, no universe -- infact, the only thing we'd done (aside from installing the foomatic printer drivers and configuring ufw to do basic firewalling) was install the binary codecs in the .gstreamer-0.10/plugins/ directory, as directed by the instructions.
By new user -- I mean someone who is planning on updating from Windows 98 to something for the first time, has enough computing power to run a non-Microsoft based operating environment, but not enough to run Vista and has heard enough people rabbit on about how good it could be to finally bite the bullet.
So, having hit the wall -- I fired up Totem from the command line using: totem --gst-debug-level=2 (which outputs minimal debug spew to the console) and found:
** Message: Error: File "/home/paul/.gstreamer-0.10/plugins/libmch264dec.so.7.4.0.20778" could not be used.
fluh264dec.c(414): gst_fluh264dec_setup (): /play/decodebin1/fluh264dec0:
Could not open module: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
After hunting around, the libstdc++5 package from the universe repository was installed, Totem was restarted and now happily displays the file correctly, albeit with a major visual issue when you use the arrow-keys to rewind the movie, but that's a story for another day.
Unfortunately, there's no documentation on the website, or in the tarball that tells you about needing to install older, relatively unsupported libraries to get something to play, hence this post.
I just hope the next version is compiled against something slightly more recent, so it works out of the box in future.
