Double-clicking mp3 files gives "Failed to open: reason unknown"

[Daniel Barlow]

I hope "totem" is the appropriate package to report this

I have a folder of audo files in various formats. When I click on an ogg file,
a "Totem Movie Player" window pops up and the file starts playing. That's good.
 When I click on an mp3 file, a "Totem Movie Player" window pops up with an
error dialog saying "Totem could not play 'file:///export/mp3/09 The KLF - Last
Train To Trancentral.mp3'.
Failed to open; reason unknown". That's not good. Cancelling the requestor
causes it to pop up a second time, which is plusungood.

I assume there's either some kind of licensing reason for not shipping an mp3
doohickey, or that whichever one you chose failed to build on amd64, but it'd be
nice if either (a) the desktop (which I guess is nautilus) didn't recognise them
as mp3s, or (b) the error message was a bit more informative. Perhaps it could
even point the user at a place to download an mp3 application or plugin?

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164627: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164627

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

yes, the message could be improved.

BTW totem uses gstreamer by default and you need to install gstreamer0.8-mad
from universe if you want to read mp3 files.

[Rimas Kudelis (rq)]

I suppose this should be installed by default. You *will* be getting lots of
"bugs" like this if you don't even put a note that you would FORCE everyone to
read somewhere.
I also tried to play my mp3's today, and i got the same error. It's in no way
intuitive. It's nice that i'm not a first-time user, and i didn't manage to
think that "Linux sucks!", but some newbie might think so, and it's not good. I
quite understand that mp3 support isn't quite free (btw, Debian PUTS it in the
main repo), but then maybe the installer should at least ask me (at install
time) wether i want to enable non-free packages or not? Debian's installer does
it, and it makes sense. Furthermore, that question could even include some
samples of what a non-free prog is. Maybe it could sound something like this:

Some packages (like mp3 or divx support, or java etc) are covered with patents
or aren't absolutely free (i.e., you may not be able to modify them). These
packages aren't installed by default, but you may enable them now. Also, you can
do it later by going to "Settings > Repositories" in synaptic, and enabling the
"universe" repositories.
Do you want to enable non-free packages now? [Y/N]

Asking such question at install time shouldn't confuse a user too much, but it
would provide some useful info, and a person, who would read this question,
would know what to expect from his/her choice.

[Quim Gil (qgil-interactors)]

Same thing happened to me.

I've solved it installing XMMS and pointing MP3 files to this very popular and
stable application. Since XMMS is officially supported by Ubuntu I would define
it as default application for audio files.

Another comment: due to dependencies, selecting to uninstall Totem-Gstreamer
(for instance, because you prefer Xine for video) implies uninstalling the whole
ubuntu-desktop. Is this needed?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

(In reply to comment #3)

> I've solved it installing XMMS and pointing MP3 files to this very popular and
> stable application. Since XMMS is officially supported by Ubuntu I would define
> it as default application for audio files.

xmms is an old gtk1.2 app and not integrated in GNOME, thus probably not a good
choice.

> Another comment: due to dependencies, selecting to uninstall Totem-Gstreamer
> (for instance, because you prefer Xine for video) implies uninstalling the whole
> ubuntu-desktop. Is this needed?

This is fixed in hoary.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

*** Bug 11657 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

I've opened a bug upstream about this:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164627

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The current version displays this message:
"There were no decoders found to handle the stream in file "..." , you might
need to install the corresponding plugins"

This should fix this issue, I'm closing the bug.