How to make Avidemux work under Ubuntu 13.10

Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander
Avidemux 2.5.4

I was quite disappointed in Ubuntu 13.10, when I first tried it last year. Several apps were broken and many things did not function.

One of those apps was Avidemux, which I am using regularly at home to encode videos. Note that I'm talking about avidemux2-gtk version.

In Ubuntu 13.10, Avidemux would run, but after selecting some menu item which opens a dialogue window and then closing that dialogue would always hang Avidemux.

For example Help / About will open the About window and when you click OK, the window will hang with the button still appearing pressed and after a moment the main window will fade into black-and-white indicating an unresponsive window. Only xkill will help out and put Avidemux out of its misery.


I recently decided to try again. At my workplace I had upgraded to 13.10 a while ago, as I did not need Avidemux in there. A lot of time had passed and I thought perhaps it had been fixed already and Avidemux would now work.

I installed Avidemux and surprise - it worked. No more hangs. But as I had upgraded my machine at work from 13.04 to 13.10, I was not sure as of why it worked. I decided to try it out also in fresh installation into VirtualBox.

I installed a fresh 13.10 64-bit image into a new VM, then, without installing the VirtualBox additions, upgraded the packages and then installed Avidemux. The result - it hung, like before.

I started to look for differences between the two machines. Into my work machine, I had installed a mainline 3.12 kernel - maybe that was the solution? Nope, that did not help, the Avidemux in VirtualBox would still hang.

Then I noticed that the Avidemux in my main machine was displaying its menus inside the window, and not in the global menu bar. I also noticed, that gnome-terminal, for example, was also displaying its menus inside the main window, so I ran dpkg --get-selections|sort in both machines and compared the selections. And there was the answer - my main machine was missing the following packages:

unity-gtk2-module
unity-gtk3-module
unity-gtk-module-common

I removed these packages from my VirtualMachine installation and confirmed that Avidemux would no longer hang. Problem solved.