But, in a fresh Arch Linux install you still need a few gstreamer packages to enable totem-video-thumbnailer to do its job…

1. Install necessary packages (as root):

pacman -Sy --needed totem gstreamer0.10-{{bad,good,ugly,base}{,-plugins},ffmpeg}

2. Delete old video thumbnails to force generation of new ones:

rm -rf ~/.thumbnails/fail

3. Browse a folder of video files in Nautilus:

In some cases you may need to restart Nautlius for the changes to take effect:

killall nautilus

…or simply log out and log in again.

System Info

• Arch Linux – Kernel 2.6.31-ARCH
• Gnome 2.28.0
• packages gnome & gnome-extra

Source

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Common_codecs

Surprisingly enough there are no documented settings for Recent Documents, not even something in gconf-editor, so people have been going stone age to prevent this functionality. In the past you could change permissions for the file that stores the data in your home directory, but it seems in later versions of Gnome the following is the current method of choice.

METHOD:

Enter the following into a terminal:

rm ~/.recently-used.xbel
mkdir ~/.recently-used.xbel

When you’re done, go check your menu and Recent Documents should be grayed out.

This works because the data concerning your recent documents can’t be written to a directory and the Recent Documents menu item is simply disabled. (I played around with retaining the text file and changing its permissions, but they were eventually always overwritten.)

NOTES:

It has been mentioned that you may receive GTK related warnings in the console after applying this, since we did a sort of end-run that’s kind of expected.

There was another method that involved making the file immutable (sudo chattr +i ~/.recently-used.xbel) but this is only for ext2/ext3 filesystems (I prefer JFS whenever applicable).

There may also be a left over file, ~/.recently_used that you can also remove:

rm ~/.recently-used

SOURCES:

Arch Linux Forums /  Disable Gnome Recent Documents [solved]

Disable recent documents – Ubuntu Forums

I take no responsibility for coming up with this hack, I just wanted to clearly document it. BTW, this has been a problem since 2005 > Bug 30942 – Request to add option to disable ‘Recent Documents’ lists

At first I was confused because the system seemed to still be running just fine, then… eh dreaded full lock up. Of course on reboot I got a grub error and from there it was “so, what exactly was on that drive?…” Turns out that my coworker had a few months worth of work in Blender files in his home directory, WHY he didn’t ever think to backup to the RAID 1 NAS we have, I have no idea…

So my dilemma was that I had wiped out the partition structure, making it a bit hard to rescue data. Besides that I had totally forgotten how his partitions were laid out in the first place. After messing up the superblock further by screwin’ around with jfs_debug I decided to give PhotoRec a go at the drive. PhotoRec by CGSecurity is an absolutely amazing tool. If the files you wish to recover are supported by it (and they have a huge list) then you are in good shape – and holy crap! .blends are supported! PhotoRec is cross-platform and cross-filesystem unlike nearly any other tool out there. The great thing is that I was able to select the whole disk to search (not just the two partitions that were supposedly both swap) and PhotoRec ignored the filesystem – perfect for my situation.

I was so glad to see the # of found .blends growing steadily… until it got to about 900. Oh yeah, bad thing about file recovery software is that it not only finds the files that were last written to the drive but the deleted and reformatted ones as well, (it’s that good) and due to the nature of the recovery process file names aren’t preserved. So my buddy has a lot of files to look through, a lot better then nothing!

BTW I originally started using PhotoRec on failed customer hard drives – again a bit a of a chore because you get lots of files you don’t want, but this is sort of the curse of file recovery, and it really is great when you dig out the files you need.