Comment 1 for bug 1818529

Short English version of the bug report:

Parole and VLC both did not react as expected when they tried to open a broken video file. I am not sure if this is due to both using common libraries or parts of the same code: I do not know.

Parole gave a completely misleading message about a missing plug in to decode text/html in order to play the given file and offered to load the extension. However it did not do that.

Requiring an extension targeted at the keywords decode, text or html just for a broken file was very misleading and it cost me a lot of time.

It would be worth looking up if all errors of file format are caught when reading a file and when trying to show it. Especially when parole shows an error message dealing with extensions or plugins to decode text or html. https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1572994 and https://www.bsdforen.de/threads/suche-text-html-decoder.34850/ and https://askubuntu.com/questions/378689/how-to-uninstall-these-parole-plugins seem to deal with the same type of error message, so it seems to be haunting for quite a while.

VLC simply does not give any error message and does nothing if one clicks on the play button.

Both programs should issue an error message like "the given file is not properly formatted" or "read error in the file" after attempt to read it was unsuccessful. If such an error can only be detected when playing a file, this would also be the right moment to tell about the error, if it can not be recovered. Some more information about the error of course would be helpful (e.g. the file format at the beginning was ok but after ca .... Bytes inside an unrecoverable error happened. The file seems to be broken)."