Bug 407930

Summary: Something spams the notification area with hundreds of "Additional multimedia codec required"
Product: [Frameworks and Libraries] frameworks-knotifications Reporter: Ralf Jung <post>
Component: generalAssignee: kdelibs bugs <kdelibs-bugs-null>
Status: RESOLVED DOWNSTREAM    
Severity: normal CC: kdelibs-bugs-null, nate
Priority: NOR    
Version First Reported In: 5.54.0   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Other   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Ralf Jung 2019-05-25 07:26:10 UTC 
SUMMARY
Sometimes (around every two days), Plasma goes crazy showing notifications that say "Additional multimedia codec required". Closing one just makes the next appear, and opening the notification list shows hundreds of these notifications (I can scroll down for a long while in that list and still see just more duplicates of the same notification). CPU load goes to 100%.

Clicking the "Install" button in one of these notifications opens some GNOME application saying "internet access was required but wasn't available". The window title says "Vorbis decoder", so it seems like something thinks I don't have a vorbis decoder? ".ogg" files play just fine though.

This stops when I close Konsole. In this state, closing individual tabs in Konsole does not work any more (they just stay open even when I hit Ctrl-D), but closing the entire window works. However, I have (very rarely) also seen Kate do this. Just Konsole does it much more often.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Open Konsole.
2. Use it for a day or two.

OBSERVED RESULT
Something spams the system with notifications saying I need an extra audio codec. This stops when I close Konsole.

EXPECTED RESULT
There should be no notification spam. Also audio is working fine so the message seems wrong in the first place.

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 10
KDE Plasma Version: 5.14.5
Qt Version: 5.11.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.54.0
Kernel Version: 4.19.0-5-amd64
OS Type: 64-bit

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
My guess is that this is caused by the notification system or so? It wants to play an ".ogg" file, something goes wrong, then it concludes the codec is missing and somehow retries that in a loop? But notifications in Konsole generally work fine. Still, clearly this bug is not in Konsole-the-applocation but somewhere in KDE's library stack.

The same symptoms have been described at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1551152, so this is not a Debian thing.
Comment 1 Ralf Jung 2019-05-25 07:28:20 UTC 
I have found this in my ".xsession-errors":

qt.qpa.xcb: QXcbConnection: XCB error: 2 (BadValue), sequence: 59768, resource id: 90177543, major code: 142 (Unknown), minor code: 3
qt.qpa.xcb: QXcbConnection: XCB error: 2 (BadValue), sequence: 60242, resource id: 35651590, major code: 142 (Unknown), minor code: 3
** Message: 09:11:25.639: PackageKit: xid = 90177543
** Message: 09:11:25.639: PackageKit: desktop_id = (null)
** Message: 09:11:25.639: PackageKit: Codec nice name: Vorbis decoder
** Message: 09:11:25.639: PackageKit: structure: gstreamer1(decoder-audio/x-vorbis)()(64bit)

Unfortunately there is no indication *why* it requests that codec from PackageKit.  Also this lets me count how often I got that notification...

$ fgrep decoder-audio/x-vorbis .xsession-errors -c
8926
Comment 2 Ralf Jung 2019-05-25 07:29:38 UTC 
Another report of the same issue for opensuse: https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-gnome/2016-06/msg00001.html
Comment 3 Nate Graham 2019-05-26 23:44:41 UTC 
This is some misbehaving GNOME app IIRC. It would be very helpful if you can determine which one it is.
Comment 4 Ralf Jung 2019-05-27 07:11:43 UTC 
Do you have any suggestion for how one could determine which application is responsible?  I am not even sure if I had any GNOME app running when the issue occurred.

So far the spamming always stopped when I quit Kate/Konsole -- so looks more like a KDE issue to me. My guess is that a GNOME app open when I click the notification because somehow GNOME's software center is the default, but that's not the main problem here.
Comment 5 Christoph Feck 2019-05-27 11:38:18 UTC 
Bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1638147 suggests a binary named "pk-gstreamer-install". You could ask in a forum of your distribution which package tries to install this.
Comment 6 Christoph Feck 2019-05-27 11:43:06 UTC 
More information on bug 391317.
Comment 7 Ralf Jung 2019-05-28 16:19:42 UTC 
A few days ago I have uninstalled "gstreamer1.0-packagekit" and have not had the issue any more since then (but I am going to wait some more days to be sure).  And indeed that package contains "pk-gstreamer-install".

Phonon is using the GStreamer backend, so maybe that's how such things could be caused by a KDE application?
Comment 8 Christoph Feck 2019-06-14 15:03:56 UTC 
Yep. Please report to developers of gstreamer-packagekit.