Created attachment 37425 [details] [review]
patch

Hi William,

the errors in GStreamer are indeed bad. However, your patch appears to add
several layers to "hide" or "encapsulate" the error into something readable. Is
that really a solution? Isn't fixing GStreamer's error messages much better? It
is actually on my TODO list, but unfortunately there's lots of stuff on my TODO
list, kind of swamping me... :-/.

I think that this actually is the correct solution.  The user should never be
forced to see sub-process errors directly.  For example, look at what nautilus
does.  When you can't eject a disc with nautilus it doesn't say
"Error unmounting /dev/hdc: device busy" or something directly in the secondary
text of the dialog.

Rather, it hides that part from the user in a details expander.  It has to be
there somewhere because it is the part that the sysadmin/tech support is going
to want to see.

Do GStreamer errors need to improve anyway?  Certainly.  And I will gladly try
to help with this.  However, they will continue to be technical in nature - as
they should be.  GStreamer is a user-invisible subsystem.

I think you are correct, yeah... I'm not sure how much detail the user will want
(obviously, if the file failed to open because it doesn't exist, the user should
know, because then he mistyped it or the webpage on which he clicked is broken;
it's not the same as 'codec not supported').

Need to rethink that for a while.

I don't know whether this has appeared in bugzilla yet, but I don't want to see
debug messages in Totem's UI (the only case where that would be useful is if
external programs are called).
So the details button is a no-no.

Let's close this, there was no new versions of the patch in a long while, and it probably got better...