Disappearing AV properties tab [SOLVED]

[Brian49]

Since I installed Mint, there has always been a tab for audiovisual properties in the file properties dialog for any media file, giving useful basic information about the file. But all of a sudden that tab is no longer there. I have no idea what could have made it disappear. I can't find any reference to it in the Nautilus preferences. Any ideas, please? Many thanks.

[Husse]

Which Mint?
Don't expect me to remember that
I have looked at it in Helena but I don't find anything. The place to look in should be the gconf-editor (easiest way to open is a launcher)

[Brian49]

Mint 8, GNOME edition.

I can't find anything relevant in the config editor. There's only the Totem movie-properties plugin, marked as active, but as far as I can see it only operates within the Totem GUI. Making Totem the default player for movies doesn't bring back the disappearing file properties tab.

[Husse]

I think this may take a while to figure out so I have to add it to my list of unsolved posts and come back to you
After all this is not something you need to have fixed in a hurry - I hope
One thing that came to mind just now is that Nautilus might not recognize multimedia files any more, that tab is only there for certain file types

[Brian49]

Many thanks for keeping this on your list.

There seem to be all sorts of hidden gremlins in Nautilus.

I mainly relied on this tab to check the duration of an AVI movie before deciding whether to play it. Do you happen to know any other way of doing that, please, apart from the obvious one of loading the file in a player? Thanks again.

[Husse]

The size of the file will at least give an approximation

[Brian49]

Not really - most of my movie files are about the same size (700Mb).

I tried some other file managers to see if they fare any better. Most of them don't, but ROX-Filer provides the RIFF (little-endian) data: dimensions, codecs, frame rate, mono/stereo, and sampling rate - everything except the duration. The "file" CLI application also gives these RIFF data.

I found in synaptic another CLI application called Extract which additionally gives the duration (in milliseconds). There is also AVInfo, which gives the duration in normal style.

[remoulder]

Brian, are the media files till associated with the correct types in nautilus? An easy way to check all the file associations is to install ubuntu-tweak.

[Brian49]

Many thanks for taking an interest. I already have Ubuntu Tweak installed. I have all movie filetypes associated with VLC, and have done for some time. Please explain what you mean by the "correct" associations.

[remoulder]

Please explain what you mean by the "correct" associations.

Simply what you have already done. I was thinking this may have been a mimetypes problem, but maybe not. AFAICT the media properties tab in nautilus is provided by totem, which I guess is dependent on gstreamer and lame to provide the info. Did you changed, install or un-install anything before this problem occurred? Do you get the media tab if you log in as a different user?

[Brian49]

Your diagnosis looks right. I did make some changes to both totem and gstreamer - basically I tried to remove them (and also pulseaudio) from my system as far as I could without breaking anything. Perhaps the media tab is the one thing I did break, as I haven't noticed any other problems since then. The media tab doesn't show up if I log in as a different user, but I guess that's to be expected in view of what I've just said.

Running avinfo in a terminal gives me the file properties I want to know about, even if it's slightly more cumbersome than having the missing tab, so I'd be reluctant to try to get the tab back again by reinstalling all the unwanted software (even supposing I could exactly replicate its original state). Thanks very much indeed.

[remoulder]

both totem and gstreamer - basically I tried to remove them (and also pulseaudio)

You didn't mention this before. FWIW it's not possible to completely remove pulseaudio anymore and will probably be even less so in lucid lynx. I don't really understand why you need to remove totem and gstreamer unless you're very short on disk space, their presence doesn't prevent you using alternatives. Horses for courses I guess?

[Brian49]

Apologies - I stupidly failed to make the connection, imagining that the media tab somehow has a life of its own. In general, I like to strip out any software that I never use, provided it can be done safely. On that basis, most of the gstreamer components are in fact still installed. Thanks again.

Edit: After a rethink, I've reinstalled the gstreamer and totem components I previously removed. The tab is now back.