Media players crashing "Bus Error (core dumped)"

[Anuovis]

I have been using Ubuntu for years and the current 12.04 since it was released, never had a problem like this.
Not sure when it started but I can't play any video files at the moment, my media players just crash.

VLC
Doesn't start at all. If I run it from terminal I get:


VLC media player 2.0.8 Twoflower (revision 2.0.8a-0-g68cf50b)
Bus error (core dumped)

Totem
Starts fine, can play mp3 files. Whenever I try to open a video file, it crashes.

When ran from terminal:

(totem:22112): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: Read/writable property 'object' on class 'ZeitgeistDpPlugin' has type 'TotemObject' which is not exactly equal to the type 'GObject' of the property on the interface 'PeasActivatable'

During crashes (opening the video file):

Bus error (core dumped)

SMPlayer
Starts fine, crashes when I try to play either an mp3 file or a video file. Terminal doesn't give any output, just

This is SMPlayer v. 0.7.0 (SVN r3809) running on Linux

All crashes usually pop some "Ubuntu experienced internal error", "System experienced internal error" screens, sometimes a few at a time, with the option of reporting the problem. SMPlayer has a crash log of its own, it seems. I could post that if it would be helpful.

The video files I tried were .flv and .mp4
Youtube videos in the browser play just fine, a game that I have in Wine plays the video intro just fine. But I can't view any video files on my hardrive.

Things that haven't worked so far:
-restarting/updating the system
-reinstalling VLC and Ubuntu Restricted Extras
-adding my username in Audio and Pulse groups, as suggested in the answer here (http://askubuntu.com/questions/165895/no-media-player-working-except-vlc-by-an-ordinary-user).

Is there any way to fix this?

[sanderj]

with the option of reporting the problem.

... and did you do that? Because that reporting also does "comparison" against existing bug reports. In other words: is it a known bug.

[Anuovis]

I did that a few times, but it did not show me any comparisons to other bugs. Is it supposed to? Did I miss it?

I tried googling this problem but there seem to be lots of variations to this. There are also hits from as far as 2008, I have no idea how to filter them out. The Ubuntu crash reports are very long and I am not sure which parts are relevant to this problem.

If I should just wait for an update, I am more or less fine with that. What else could I do?

[sanderj]

The website should do the analysis based on Ubuntu's own one-liner, not you.

My guess in order of likelyhood:
1) local installation / configuration problem on your system. Easy to test: live-boot a fresh Ubuntu from USB-stick/CD and try VLC
2) memory problem. Test with "memtest86" in the GRUB boot menu
3) a bug in Ubuntu.

[Anuovis]

I haven't tested these yet, had a crazy busy week. But now my system pops a system error message/report after each boot into the desktop. So there is probably something corrupted within the system and a few updates I had in the meanwhile didn't fix it. I will do the memtest and most likely just reinstall the whole thing instead of hunting this down, seems like an easier solution right now.

Thank you for the help.