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Bug 303942 - Don't popup error dialog when playing unsupported files.
Don't popup error dialog when playing unsupported files.
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: totem
Classification: Core
Component: Movie player
unspecified
Other Linux
: Normal enhancement
: ---
Assigned To: General Totem maintainer(s)
General Totem maintainer(s)
: 312129 325868 344587 357705 531571 532148 582090 611697 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2005-05-12 18:07 UTC by Jorrith Schaap
Modified: 2018-05-24 10:26 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: 2.11/2.12



Description Jorrith Schaap 2005-05-12 18:07:35 UTC
Drag 'n drop a dir with mixed files (eg. mp3s + a jpg of the album cover) to 
Totem. All files get added to the playlist, even the unsupported jpeg. On 
playback, when Totem tries to play the jpeg (which fails), an error dialog pops 
up.

Ideally, Totem should filter out all unsupported files from the playlist, just 
like Winamp does.
Comment 1 Karel Demeyer 2005-05-27 13:04:30 UTC
and also have an option to keeperrors in teh background.  I like to walk outside
with my wireless headphones on and I use totem as music player.  So, what pisses
y of is that sometimes I dragged a wrong or corupted file in my playlist so I
heard the music stop, I have to go inside, disable my screensaver, press ok and
remove it ...  It would be better if Totem just shows the error but goes to the
next file in the playlist :D
Comment 2 Michaël Arnauts 2005-08-05 12:51:36 UTC
*** Bug 312129 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 3 Karel Demeyer 2005-08-13 18:20:32 UTC
http://student.vub.ac.be/~kmdemeye/totem-filerr.png the mockup I made for  Bug
312129, maybe it's a bad idea, but I don't want it to get lost ;)
Comment 4 Stephen 2006-03-29 16:41:19 UTC
I'll add my support to this one. The error message is blocking, and I encounter it with a specific use - some streaming radio/video servers error occasionally when connecting (I don't know if it's them or Totem), but works the second time. This means that to try again, I have to click 'OK' to clear the error message and then again to re-connect.

To me, this feels like, "you must pay attention to this error or I will refuse to let you do anything else".

Other Gnome projects are moving away from blocking items like this - see the 2.14 GEdit for example, and I hope Totem will move in this direction too.

Another option for the error is something similar to Firefox/GEdit style inline error messages.
Comment 5 Sebastien Bacher 2006-04-08 11:54:15 UTC
Ubuntu bug about that: https://launchpad.net/products/totem/+bug/38707

"I really like that Totem now has a playlist as it means that I can finally replace xmms to play my .m3u files.

I have manually deleted a few of the files in the .m3u playlist and every time that I hit one of these in Totem, the music stops and an error message is displayed. This is sensible behaviour if Totem is only being called to play one file, but if it is playing a playlist it should just skip over files that are no longer at the location specified.

Winamp, Xmms and every other player I have used with a playlist skips over missing files."
Comment 6 Bastien Nocera 2006-06-12 09:31:46 UTC
*** Bug 344587 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 7 Bastien Nocera 2006-06-17 09:31:02 UTC
*** Bug 325868 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 8 Chris Murphy 2006-09-26 03:37:00 UTC
*** Bug 357705 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 9 Chris Murphy 2006-09-26 03:39:38 UTC
From Gnome HIG v2.0:
  "Display an error alert when a user-requested operation cannot be sucessfully completed. Present errors caused by operations not requested by the user by another means, unless the error could result in data loss or other serious problems. ...an error encountered in an automated periodic email check would more appropriately report failure with a statusbar message."

This situation seems to fall more into the latter category of errors than the former.  While I /did/ request that GNOME play that song, a fairly typical use-case for totem is the queuing up of large quantities of files to play in sequence.

  In this case, it seems more appropriate to mark the file as unplayable (maybe with a /!\ icon in the playlist, or as mocked up above by Karel) than to stop the entire playback operation.  At any rate, it's really annoying to queue up some music, and have to come back every 10 minutes when it's found another file it doesn't know how to handle.
Comment 10 Romulo Fernandes 2007-01-29 05:13:09 UTC
i can work on this if its going to be that way, better would be a debug console or something very discrete to show the error, like the /!\ icon suggested by Chris Murphy. If everybody agrees with that i will work on it
Comment 11 Porges 2007-04-12 22:17:55 UTC
I like Karel's mockup :)
Comment 12 Nick G 2007-04-14 12:08:58 UTC
Romulo - how did you get on? I had a look today and it looks a little more complex than I expected it to be.
Comment 13 Romulo Fernandes 2007-04-14 13:56:48 UTC
havent worked on it yet, i want to know if anyone is doing so i can make my code if nobody is
Comment 14 Nick G 2007-04-14 21:27:22 UTC
Well I think it's just assigned to you at the moment. Are you ok with doing it?
Comment 15 Romulo Fernandes 2007-04-15 01:37:03 UTC
yeah i will grab latest source and do it
Comment 16 Diego Escalante Urrelo (not reading bugmail) 2007-09-14 23:30:08 UTC
I just tried adding a dir with an mp3, some jpgs and other stuff to totem and it only added the mp3, is this fixed?.
Comment 17 Bastien Nocera 2007-09-18 10:17:35 UTC
(In reply to comment #16)
> I just tried adding a dir with an mp3, some jpgs and other stuff to totem and
> it only added the mp3, is this fixed?.

No, the problem is when some files that did get to the playlist aren't supported. The asked for functionality is to skip unplayable files (eg. skip the mp3s if no mp3 decoder is installed). Extra care need to be taken because of the missing-plugins support, and to avoid looping over a list of unplayable files and chewing CPU when repeat is on.
Comment 18 Bastien Nocera 2008-12-05 16:36:03 UTC
*** Bug 531571 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 19 Bastien Nocera 2009-05-08 13:09:35 UTC
*** Bug 532148 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 20 Romulo Fernandes 2009-05-08 16:04:46 UTC
going to grab the sources later today and have a mess with, even forgot about this bug sorry :(
Comment 21 Philip Withnall 2009-05-10 21:17:20 UTC
*** Bug 582090 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 22 Martin Olsson 2009-05-10 21:46:18 UTC
I had some files in my playlist that didn't even exist (the .m3u used to have the full album but I deleted some songs since they were not that good). Yesterday I was playing a huge folder with music in totem directly from a network share. Since the error came after totem had successfully played for 1 hour or more, I assumed it was because the network had gone down (or that the network server had too many connections or something). I was trying to do some basic network troubleshooting to fix it but I couldn't figure out what the problem was.

I would like to add my +1 for two things:
A) please make the error appear as soon as possible and hopefully as a result of an explicit user action (i.e. as soon as I _load_ a playlist with non-existing songs in it, while I'm still at the computer... don't show an error 1 hour later when I'm the kitchen making pancakes). I don't think an unplayable file has anything to do in my sidebar / totem playlist at all (even if it's in the .m3u for some arcane reason). I can accept having them as entries in the sidebar / totem playlist along with a !-marker though, if that prevents a big ugly debug console, as long as totem doesn't try to play the songs with !-markers / i.e. there are no additional error popups appearing while it playing the songs. Maybe some really smart person can come up with a third solution which has both clean UI (no big error dialogs, no debug consoles) and communicates well with the user (no implicit skipping over things without saying anything about the error at all).

B) please make the error a bit more understandable (explaining that "file doesn't exist", "file is corrupted", "file format is not supported" etc)

---

And finally a big thanks to Romulo Fernandes for actually working on fixing this!
Comment 23 Philip Withnall 2009-05-30 21:42:20 UTC
*** Bug 584312 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 24 Kamil Páral 2009-05-30 21:50:33 UTC
This annoying bug is 4 years old. Come on, please!
Comment 25 Nick G 2009-07-01 13:12:47 UTC
Romulo, any updates?

I couldn't get the svn version to build (can't find gstreamer) on my Ubuntu box but building the one from the repos I hacked on totem-object.c and backend/bacon-video-widget.c and it seems easy to forgo the error message and just emit a signal to play the next track. The question is, what is the desired functionality? Should it show anything at all or just silently move on?

I only see this bug with broken m3u files containing bad file links now so this will only appear if someone does something silly like add a jpg to a playlist.
Comment 26 Romulo Fernandes 2009-07-03 19:20:34 UTC
No progress yet. I tried to mess around making a compile environment with jhbuild but no success. I just uninstaleed my freebsd (bah, too much headaches) and im going to make it work on ubuntu anyway. Vacations are coming next week so its a huge candidate to do anything.
Comment 27 Bastien Nocera 2010-03-05 17:20:11 UTC
*** Bug 611697 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 28 Kartikeya Sharma 2016-10-08 10:31:30 UTC
if no one is working on it I would like to work on it (as a newcomer). I need information on how the files are loaded in totem when we do drag and drop of some folder. where I can find the code regarding that. and also from which file errors are generated(to make them more informative or maybe introduce an option to turn of errors and skip files if not supported). and where can I get information on the supported files when extra codecs are installed so that I can include them (e.g. mp3,mp4 etc.).

Thanks in advance!
Comment 29 GNOME Infrastructure Team 2018-05-24 10:26:07 UTC
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/totem/issues/2.