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I get a notification that says "Additional Multimedia Codecs Required" from Gnome Software, if I try to close it, it reappears, if I kill gnome-software, it just restarts instantly and displays the same message, I can't really uninstall Gnome, because I need it for testing things.

TurboWafflz
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  • Welcome to Unix Stackexchange! You can take the tour first and then learn How to Ask a good question. That makes it easier for us to help you. – andcoz Aug 21 '18 at 13:07
  • You need to discover which program is trying to open some unsupported media file. gnome-software is started over and over by some other software that wants to open a video or an audio file. – andcoz Aug 21 '18 at 13:08
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    I can't, clicking the notification just says software not found. – TurboWafflz Aug 21 '18 at 20:33
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    This happens to me too in Ubuntu 18.04. It locks the entire GUI. Where do I go find logs about where it is coming from? It appears to be related to some Vorbis codec despite installing all of them that I could find. – jocull Oct 24 '18 at 14:42

2 Answers2

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I have the same problem here (on Ubuntu/KDE, if that matters). I can't find out who is trying to get those codecs (ps fx just says it's started by systemd), and I can't find out which package it is trying to install (just a useless sad smiley in a window)

A quick trick to at least stop the notifications: instead of killing gnome-software, STOP it:

pkill -STOP gnome-software

The process will stay alive but won't be able to do anything, so the system won't attempt restarting it, and yet it won't be able to push those notifications.

After you do this, close the remaining notifications and they won't come back (until you reboot, that is). Do pkill -CONT gnome-software to restart it if needed.

tendays
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I suffered from this - minus several million points to whoever didn't think to pass the application name as part of the request/notification!

I ran 'ps axf' and looked through for any likely culprits.

I found

2614 ? Sl 7:02 _ /usr/bin/kaccess 10331 ? Rl 0:00 | _ /usr/bin/gstreamer-codec-install gstreamer|1.0|kaccess|Vorbis decoder|decoder-audio

and was about to kill it, but then noticed that I hadn't rebooted since the recent software update.

Having rebooted, the notifications stopped.

Update: the message appeared again, but gstreamer wasn't in evidence. I do, however, have an update requesting a reboot. This time, I'll take a copy of the pstree, for comparison next time.

Update: It happened again. I noticed in the notifications lister from the icon bar that the 'just now' was flickering, indicating that whatever was asking for it was doing so VERY rapidly. Running top indicated that kaccess was very busy. Killing kaccess sorted the problem: it allowed me to kill the two notifications without any more appearing.

So it's a kaccess bug - at least, for me. Perhaps it's something stupid like the sound file it uses to warn about alerts having been created with the wrong Vorbis version, so trying to alert causes it to ask for the codec, but the codec isn't installed, so it alerts, but the codec isn't installed...

I submitted a bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-desktop/+bug/1905403

Tim Baverstock
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