Black screen without feedback when requesting to play a stream

[Olivier Tilloy]

Steps to reproduce:

1) Start Elisa, go to Video/Internet/Youtube/Top Rated
2) Click on the first video in the list. After the spinning animation finishes and the video list disappears, the video player appears.

Expected result: while requesting for the stream (even before the buffering phase), the player displays the OSD and some sort of "loading" animation.

Current result: requesting the stream takes a while, during which time the screen is completely black. This is really bad as it induces the user to think the application crashed.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Note that the steps to reproduce use youtube videos, but this is a generic issues for all streams requested over the network.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

The long waiting time happens before buffering, when the pipeline is prerolling.

This is particularly visible for youtube videos, and can be put in evidence executing the following command in a terminal:

    gst-launch playbin uri="http://www.youtube.com/get_video?fmt=18&video_id=d-XbjFn3aqE&t=vjVQa1PpcFMvFyc5KoHcQrV2j5Gs1Zw4K8fgCC3E3yo="

So what we need here is a special wait animation for the player OSD while the pipeline is prerolling (it could reuse the buffering animation with a different text label).