In order to enable the AV features of Gajim it needs gstreamer1.0-gtk3 to be installed, but this doesn't seem to be in the list of recommended packages. If gstreamer1.0-gtk3 isn't installed, the create_gtk_widget() function in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gajim/gtk/gstreamer.py will fail due to gtkglsink and gtksink not being available and gst-inspect also shows this: gst-inspect-1.0 gtkglsink No such element or plugin 'gtkglsink' gst-inspect-1.0 gtksink No such element or plugin 'gtksink' After installing gstreamer1.0-gtk3 , the Audio/Video options become available and gst-inspect shows info for gtkglsink and gtksink. I haven't tested the testing or unstable versions of gajim, but I suspect they might have the same problem as it looks like gstreamer.py references the same gst modules in gajim 1.9.5.