Thanks for the feedback, but can you please provide more specific ways to reproduce ? This kind of report is basically useless if we can't reproduce :)

Why are certain [Config Options] in French and others in Spanish?
I guess they should be all in English, since they are not exposed to the user.

First I thought the problem is caused by the non ASCII character in your path, but I could not reproduce it with 

last-folder = /home/bmonkey/Vidéos/xges files that won't render because they're borked

The xges was located in the same folder. The project file was called "just Big
Buck Bunny.xges".


The problem is in the function which tries to determine the "mtime" of a path. The encoding error happens here, since a non ASCII character is used in a bytestring. Python 3 is very restrictive here.

time_diff = os.path.getmtime(backup_path) - os.path.getmtime(path)

Could you please add this print statement around line 190 in your project.py:

        print (type(path), path)
        print (type(backup_path), backup_path)
        
        try:
            time_diff = os.path.getmtime(backup_path) - os.path.getmtime(path)
            self.debug('Backup file is %d secs newer: %s', time_diff, backup_path)

For me the print output is:

<class 'str'> /home/bmonkey/Vidéos/xges files that won't render because they're borked/just Big Buck Bunny.xges
<class 'str'> /home/bmonkey/Vidéos/xges files that won't render because they're borked/just Big Buck Bunny.xges~

And it does not crash.

The char from your exception is '\xe9' or 'é', the first non ASCII character in "Vidéos".

In [1]: "\xe9"
Out[1]: 'é'


Could you provide your xges file?

$ LANG=C pitivi
and then opening this file, with the welcome dialog's recently used file list:

~/Vidéos/montage/2014 FACIL clé multiboot/clé FACIL - montage final final.xges


...yields this traceback:

+ Trace 234033

And if you try to do it directly from the commandline:
$ LANG=C pitivi "/home/jeff/Vidéos/montage/2014 FACIL clé multiboot/clé FACIL - montage final final.xges"

Failed to initialize modules
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/jeff/pitivi-git/pitivi/bin/pitivi", line 132, in <module>
    _initialize_modules()
  File "/home/jeff/pitivi-git/pitivi/bin/pitivi", line 112, in _initialize_modules
    initialize_modules()
  File "pitivi/check.py", line 255, in initialize_modules
    from gi.repository import Gdk
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1567, in _find_and_load
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1534, in _find_and_load_unlocked
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/site-packages/gi/importer.py", line 68, in load_module
    dynamic_module._load()
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/site-packages/gi/module.py", line 296, in _load
    self._overrides_module = importlib.import_module('gi.overrides.' + self._namespace)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/importlib/__init__.py", line 90, in import_module
    return _bootstrap._gcd_import(name[level:], package, level)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/site-packages/gi/overrides/Gdk.py", line 396, in <module>
    initialized, argv = Gdk.init_check(sys.argv)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't encode character '\udcc3' in position 14: surrogates not allowed



....BUT! This only happens when I run with LANG=C. When I run with my default language (French Canadian), I don't get this traceback, in both situations.

I made a new Fedora 20 VM and created the following file with Pitivi:

/home/bmonkey/Vidéos/montage/2014 FACIL clé multiboot/clé FACIL - montage final final.xges

I was able to open it in the "recently used" dialog without any exceptions.

Could you try to reproduce the issue on a fresh VM?

The "fix" for bug #729523 (considering that LANG=C is not valid) makes this moot.