Plugin issue with Amarok

English Multimedia
1

I’m on openSUSE 13.1 (64 bit) running amarok 2.8.0 and could use a little help with what appears to be a gstreamer plugin problem. This has been present since I installed 13.1 some months ago - I’m just getting around to looking at it.

The problem is an error box that pops up whenever a music track stops playing, either because it reaches the end or you click “stop”. It often seems to be the transition from music to silence that causes it because it doesn’t appear if there’s another track to play next in the playlist, but sometimes it appears if you click on the playlist to switch to a different track. It’s similar to the issue in this thread: http://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/498244-Amarok-requires-additional-plugin-usr-lib-gst-install-plugins-helper-Cannot-find-plugin except that it doesn’t seem to depend on the music format being played. I’m playing flac, mp3 and midi mainly and it happens with all of them.

The error message is:

/usr/lib/gst-install-plugins-helper requires an additional plugin for this operation
followed by
FILE protocol source
and then
The following plugin is required. Do you want to search for this now?
There is no plugin name and searching (clicking “Continue”) turns up nothing useful.

So far, I’ve been carefully through the 13.1 multimedia installation guide https://forums.opensuse.org/entry.php/149-openSUSE-13-1-Multi-media-and-Restricted-Format-Installation-Guide and checked that all the listed plugins (for KDE) are installed (they are). Amarok and all the plugins come from packman apart from a couple of items that only seem to be in the openSUSE repositories.

I’ve been through all the gstreamer plugins listed by Yast and installed any extra ones that seemed applicable (i.e. not 32-bit or dev/debug/doc packages). This brought in:

gstreamer-utils
gstreamer-1_10-utils
gstreamer-1_10-plugins-fluendo_mp3
gstreamer-fluendo-mp3

but it made no difference.

I’ve also installed the command-line gstreamer player “gst123” and that works fine - no messages about missing plugins.

So I’m struggling for ideas at this point. Any help about how to find out what’s missing would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

2

Make sure you are not mixing version from different repos.

3

Ah! I think I’ve solved it. I ran amarok from a terminal with “–debug” and then googled what seemed like the relevant bit of output and found this thread: http://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/495297-Amarok-error-towards-end-of-song? . It suggests deleting the ~/.gstreamer-0.10 cache. That seems to have fixed it.

What threw me off the scent was, obviously the misleading error message, but also the fact the problem appears in several user accounts, so I was looking for an install problem. But it appears something has been systematically corrupting all users’ caches (probably whatever gstreamer does to upgrade after you install openSUSE 13.1 I would think).