Totem fails playing some mpeg videos

[Jim Louvau]

Binary package hint: totem

Playing mpegs that worked under Intrepid causes a failure in Jaunty. I see no commonality other than it's only mpegs. Various ones that report the same audio and video codecs crash and others don't (same codecs). A "broken" file is always broken, so it isn't random behavior. I just see no difference in the A/V codecs being used. I see this when launched from the command-line:

totem 'some.mpg'
/var/lib/python-support/python2.6/gdata/tlslite/utils/cryptomath.py:9: DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead
  import sha
** Message: Error: Disconnected: OK
pulsesink.c(451): gst_pulsesink_is_dead (): /GstPlayBin:play/GstBin:abin/GstBin:audiosinkbin/GstGConfAudioSink:audio-sink/GstBin:bin5/GstAutoAudioSink:autoaudiosink1/GstPulseSink:autoaudiosink1-actual-sink-pulse

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/totem-gstreamer
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: totem-gstreamer 2.26.0-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SourcePackage: totem
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic x86_64

[Jim Louvau (jlouvau)]

Oops. It looks like it's ANY mpeg. I had some mp4's in the same directory that it was playing fine. Xine, mplayer, VLC .. everybody plays them fine except Totem. Totem is reporting the video codec as unknown. Others report it as mpgv or just mpeg. Yes, I have gstreamer good, bad, ugly, sleepy, wheezy, dopey installed :) This is on an upgrade (not fresh install) from Intrepid FWIW.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

 * Is this reproducible?
 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?
 * What error do you get exactly?

 This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[Jim Louvau (jlouvau)]

* Is this reproducible? Yes (please see above).

* If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug? Try to play ANY *.mpg file (please see above).

* What error do you get exactly? The one posted in the original report (please see above). That's what I see if I run Totem from the command-line. The application itself pops up an error dialog that says "An error occurred Disconnected: OK" which is about as useful as a Windows "file not found."

The properties panel says Totem doesn't know what the video codec is ("N/A"). VLC says the video stream is "mpgv."

Ffmpeg says:

Input #0, mpeg, from 'test.mpg':
  Duration: 00:05:11.48, start: 0.483722, bitrate: 1146 kb/s
    Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg1video, yuv420p, 352x288 [PAR 1:1 DAR 11:9], 1000 kb/s, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 25 tbc
    Stream #0.1[0x1c0]: Audio: mp2, 32000 Hz, stereo, s16, 128 kb/s

VLC, Xine, MPlayer are all working fine with the same mpg files. Avidemux complains on some that it's can't determine the aspect ratio but still loads, plays and edits them just fine. Ffmpeg will load and manipulate them fine also. This seems to be an issue specific to Totem/GStreamer. FWIW.

[Jim Louvau (jlouvau)]

OK, I found some mpeg's that work. I can also take one of the "broken" ones and run it through ffmpeg with:

ffmpeg -i broken.mpg -acodec copy -vcodec copy fixed.mpg

And the resulting file plays fine. The only obvious difference is that the (broken) original shows 0 (zero) audio channels whereas the (working) ffmpeg generated copy says it's stereo.

Please notice that in the output in my previous comment from ffmpeg, it "sees" that the audio is stereo in the input file that shows as "0 channels" in Totem. Since a direct copy (acodec and vcodec) works, it would seem there's an issue interpreting some info from the mpeg encapsulation/header.

[Jim Louvau (jlouvau)]

Here's a "broken" mpg: http://toxiccandy.org/files/nawak.mpg

Sorry it's not smaller but if I modify it it gets fixed :-)

This used to play fine in Intrepid. Won't play in Jaunty beta as stated above.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

it seems to be a gstreamer issue or pulseaudio I'm getting the same with gst-launch and the video works fine with ffmpeg reassigning it to gstreamer for now.

[Jim Louvau (jlouvau)]

The latest crop of updates fixed it for me here. Thanks!

[Luca Aluffi (aluffilu)]

I discovered that it happens me to, after upgrade to kernel 2.6.28-12.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. A new version of GStreamer is available in both Lucid and Maverick and we are wondering if this is still reproducible in any of those versions, May you please test and give us of feedback about it? Thanks in advance.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.