totem-gstreamer doesn't play Apple QuickTime movie (fast start)

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

Despite having gstreamer0.8-faad installed I hear no sound out of the following videos when trying to play them in totem (gstreamer) or xine-ui:

http://www.wired.com/news/audio/quicktime/high/viralipod_qt_hi.mov
http://distribution.nerdtv.net/video/ntv006/ntv006.mp4

The faad extracted audio track from ntv006.mp4 sounds fine.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

I will note that the audio in previous nerdtv video files has sounded fine, so I don't think this problem is because I am missing a codec.

[Hidde Brugmans (hcbrugmans-deactivatedaccount)]

make sure you have gstreamer0.8-plugins and gstreamer0.8-plugins-multiverse installed, and see if this is still an isssue for you.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Hidde,

After doing a presitine install of Breezy and installing gstreamer0.8-plugins, gstreamer0.8-plugins-multiverse and gstreamer0.8-ffmpeg I now get the following error message trying to play ntv006.mp4:

"Failed to play: Internal GStreamer error: pad problem. File a bug."

If totem is launched from the console I see:

(totem:8398): GStreamer-WARNING **: element internal_thread claimed state-change success,but state didn't change to PLAYING. State is PAUSED (NONE_PENDING pending), fix the element

** (totem:8398): CRITICAL **: gst_ffmpegdec_release_buffer: assertion `buf != NULL' failed

If I press the play/pause button repeatedly after dismissing the dialog I can get sound but no video and the following messages are printed on the terminal:

** (totem:8398): CRITICAL **: gst_ffmpegdec_release_buffer: assertion `buf != NULL' failed

(totem:8398): GStreamer-WARNING **: pushing data on non-negotiated pad ffdec_mpeg41:src, not allowed.

xine (which doesn't use gstreamer) still has the opposite problem - video but no sound.

I suspect this bug should have been split in two. The gstreamer problem now sounds like #2776 and the xine problem need to be classified separately.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

That should have been bug #2776

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

...and bug #2776 looks in turn to be a duplicate of bug #2311

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

This bug is no longer a problem in the xine-ui within dapper but totem-gstreamer is no longer capable of playing mpeg4 files.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Ccing slomo, he probably knows about mpeg4 reading :)

[Sebastian Dröge (slomo)]

Sitsofe, do you have gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse installed? It includes the gst0.10 version of the faad plugin...

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

No I didn't have gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse (how did I overlook that?)

The good news is that ntv006.mp4 appears to play and there is the accompanying sound.

The bad news is that the viralipod_qt_hi.mov brings up a dialog which says "Could not decode stream.". xine can play this file seemingly without problem though.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Let's try to dissect the bug a bit.

[Sebastian Dröge (slomo)]

ok, let's take a look at it...
Do you have gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad installed?

[Sebastian Dröge (slomo)]

hm, tried to play it with gst-launch and qtdemux from plugins-bad installed:

Setting pipeline to PAUSED ...
Pipeline is PREROLLING ...
ERROR: from element /playbin0/decoder/faad0: Could not decode stream.
Additional debug info:
gstfaad.c(930): gst_faad_chain (): /playbin0/decoder/faad0:
Failed to decode buffer: Maximum number of scalefactor bands exceeded
ERROR: pipeline doesn't want to preroll.
Setting pipeline to NULL ...
FREEING pipeline ...

sounds like either a bug in qtdemux (sending wrong data to faad), a bug in the faad2 gst0.10 element or a bug in faad (can't handle some new aac extensions or something). as xine works fine it should be the first or the second...

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

And now after the latest round of gstreamer updates I think this problem has gone away...

Mark as fixed?

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

No I would not mark it as fixed. I just ran into some H.264/AVC-encoded quicktime trailers where I get that exact same faad-related "Maximum number of scalefactor bands exceeded"-error. The example clips below used to work just a few days ago. I don't know in which update-cycle they stopped working. Only today I recognized that they don't work anymore.

http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/superman_returns/superman_returns-tlr1_h480p.mov
http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/superman_returns/superman_returns-tlr1_h720p.mov
http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/superman_returns/superman_returns-tlr1_h1080p.mov
http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/superman_returns/superman_returns-tlr2_h480p.mov
http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/superman_returns/superman_returns-tlr2_h720p.mov
http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/superman_returns/superman_returns-tlr2_h1080p.mov

I believe those URLs won't be valid for a long time. But it should be enough for you to grab them with curl or wget if you need some material to test.

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

Damn it... forgot to mention that I'm running dapper (flight 7) here and using the most up-to-date gstreamer (in this particular case I've gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad 0.10.3-0ubuntu1 installed) bits from the repository. Ehm... according to the the gstreamer-plugin list faad should be part of gstreamer-plugins-bad 0.10.3. But

dpkg -L gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad | grep faad

does not yield any result on my system here. This seems to be wrong, doesn't it? Is this maybe a packageing error?

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

MacSlow:

I think this is a similar but different problem because first up your examples are H264 whereas mine where MPEG-4 video.

Secondly my examples played in xine but not gstreamer whereas yours seem to stutter and make a strange cricketty sound in xine even though there is a fair amount of CPU left.

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

In the gstreamer-bugzilla for gst-plugins-bad 0.10.3 are some nasty issues discussed regarding faad ABI-incompatibilities http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340762 for faad-CVS and last stable faad-release. I have the feeling this is not directly gstreamer- or totem-related at all. It would also explain why I have these faad-issues with gst-launch-0.10 and totem, but not with mplayer on my machine. Afaik mplayer uses compiled-in faad where as gstreamer uses a different (shared) library-version of faad. My installed faad-library is
2.0.0+cvs20040908+mp4v2+bmp-0ubuntu3. I don't know how to check which faad version is compiled into my mplayer (0.99+1.0pre7try2+cvs20060117-0ubuntu6). For sure is that mplayer doesn't use the shared library installed on my box. "ldd /usr/bin/mplayer | grep -i faad" did no produce any results. I hope this info helps a bit.

[Tim Müller (t-i-m-zen)]

FWIW, that some of those superman trailers didn't play due to faad erroring out was

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341231

and should be fixed in gst-plugins-bad CVS (patch should be easy to backport).

MacSlow: I doubt the faad binary incompatibility issues cited in GNOME bug #340762 apply to Ubuntu.

[Sebastian Dröge (slomo)]

Thanks Tim, I'll get this fix backported later :)

[Sebastian Dröge (slomo)]

ok, the spiderman movies play fine for me with
gst-plugins-bad 0.10_0.10.3-0ubuntu2
gst-plugins-bad-multiverse 0.10_0.10.3-2

and it seems that both updates are necessary.

[Sebastian Dröge (slomo)]

And the ABI/API incompatibility of faad upstream is fixed for us. I put some effort into it to a) get us the latest CVS that we can ship (latest has a very bad license) and b) make it ABI/API compatible to the 2.0 release (the API changes were nonsense anyway... faad -> neroaac in general)

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Even the superman trailers work now. Can this be marked fixed?

[Sebastian Dröge (slomo)]

yes, I guess we should mark it as fixed ;)

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

Indeed, totem and even my video-texture stuff - with the custom pipeline - works now with sound. Great! I'd say this is a "Fixed" candidate.

[Simos Xenitellis  (simosx)]

On vanilla 8.04, when I try to place the screencasts from
http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/screenshots/index

(such as http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/images/uploads/movies/intro_tracks15.mov),
GStreamer crashes without giving the option to install a supported codec package:

$ totem intro_tracks15.mov
** Message: Error: GStreamer encountered a general stream error.
qtdemux.c(1838): gst_qtdemux_loop (): /play/decodebin0/qtdemux0:
streaming stopped, reason not-negotiated

$ _

Installing manually the bad and ugly gstreamer packages solves the problem (totem with gstreamer backend).

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Simos:
I think you would be better off filing a new bug report and posting a link to it from here.

[Simos Xenitellis  (simosx)]

Sitsofe: Thanks.
I made the new bug report, it's available at
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gst-plugins-base0.10/+bug/226098