Cryptic error "could not open resource..."

[Scott Bronson]

After my brand new Hoary install, Totem wouldn't play anything. It would just
display a fairly hostile error dialog, "could not open resource for writing",
and quit. Two observations:

- The error message should be a lot more helpful. Something like, "Sound output
device ESD not found. Please use the Multimedia Systems Selector control panel
to select another one."

- The control panel could be placed a lot closer to the problem. Because it is
fundamentally affected by the Multimedia Systems Selector, Totem should probably
include a menu item ("Multimedia Preferences?") that opens the MSS control
panel. I only found the MSS by accident (after giving up entirely on trying to
get Totem to play sound).

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=300684: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=300684

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

this should work out of the box. What soundcard do you have? Is esound running?
does gstreamer-properties point to esd?

[Scott Bronson (bronson)]

First thing I do whenever I install Gnome is turn off ESD. Otherwise
audio/video sync is all over the place. Since ESD is trivial to turn off using
the Sound control panel, I would hope that programs would fail gracefully if
they should find themselves without it.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

by default applications are configured to use esound, if you decide to not to
use it and deconfigure this settings you have to change the applications too,
that's not a distribution bug. You can change the audiosink with
gstreamer-properties

[Scott Bronson (bronson)]

You're telling me that you're happy with the error message "could not open
resource for writing"?? An error dialog that hostile sure looks like a bug to me.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the solution would be an autosync which is worked upstream:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=300684

[Scott Bronson (bronson)]

Neat! That sounds like an excellent solution. Much better than just re-wording
the error dialog.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Upstream has marked it as fixed with that comment:

"autoaudiosink is now in use in playbin with GStreamer 0.10. It should fallback
correctly on what is available and work. Closing. Please reopen if you get the
same issue with 0.10."

doing the same with the distribution task