[bongo-devel] [bug #18627] Player failures should be reported to the user

[Daniel Brockman]

URL:
  <http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?18627>

                 Summary: Player failures should be reported to the user
                 Project: Bongo
            Submitted by: dbrock
            Submitted on: fredag 2006-12-29 den 08:42
                Category: None
                Severity: 4 - Important
              Item Group: None
                  Status: Confirmed
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

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Details:

Currently, backend player failure is handled in roughly the same way as
backend player success.  This is a problem, because it makes problems
invisible to the user and therefore difficult to identify and understand.  It
makes Bongo behave very confusingly when a backend player cannot play a
track.

Specifically, when a backend cannot play a track, attempting to play the
track will cause the playback indicators (header line, fringe icon, and mode
line indicator) to appear briefly and then disappear almost immediately. 
Then the next track is played, and — given the previous failure —, it is
likely that this track will also fail to play.  The result is a rapid
run-down through the entire playlist — the playback indicators flashing
hysterically — until finally the last track is reached and all playback
stops.

This is not good for experienced users, and it is especially not good for
inexperienced users.  Therefore, all player failures should be reported to
the user, _with_ error messages from the backend players.  When a player
fails, playback should stop, to prevent the hysterical playlist run-through. 
If we don’t stop at the first error, we should at least stop after, say,
three consecutive errors.

There is one major problem with this, namely that there appears to be no
reasonably easy way to detect when mplayer fails.  It doesn’t return an
error code, and I don’t think it prints out any message that always means
‘failure to play anything at all’.  It does print out error messages —
tons of them in fact, even for files it _can_ play — but there is no
apparent pattern or regularity in them.

What we _could_ do is treat it as a failure whenever an mplayer process
terminates within, say, a second.  Is this good enough?  Can anyone think of
a better solution?  Does anyone want to file a bug report on mplayer? :-)

I do think, however, that most players other than mplayer return error codes
on failure.  Bongo even knows about this and runs a special failure hook,
‘bongo-player-failed-functions’.  So if we just did something useful
whenever this happened, this bug would be fixed (were it not for mplayer).

Having analyzed the problem in more detail, it doesn’t seem very hard to
fix.  What’s more, it’s rather important that we do fix it, because it is
a serious bug.  (I would say ‘I will fix this in X days’, but all such
promises I have made in the past have turned out to be lies.)

I will add the development mailing list to CC — I hope noone minds.  That
will also serve the purpose of announcing the existence of this Savannah
project page.  (Don’t use it if you don’t want to — the mailing list is
still perfectly good for everything it used to be good for.  Probably better
than this website, in fact, for most purposes.)




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