XFBURN

[seppalta]

Xfburn has quit working with the message:  "Failed to initialize gstreamer transcoder: An error occurred setting gstreamer up for transcoding".   Already wasted a lot of time on this.  Ideas?  Or an alternate burner?

[MoroS]

Hi. Maybe you're missing the gstreamer plugins? Try installing them:

Code Select Expand

sudo apt-get install libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0

[seppalta]

Thanks, Moro.   I already have the latest libgstreamer stuff.
I speculate it is just an example of developers not caring about old technologies.   Who burns CD's anymore?  It seems to have started with the advent of systemd.  I have several laptops.   Sometimes the problem does not occur, but I never remember which laptop and I  think it is inconsistent anyway.  Oh, well, not a big deal.  Thought someone might know a light-weight substitute for xfburn, which has served me well for years.  Brasero is quite heavy, and does not always work either, if I recall correctly.

[MoroS]

Hmm... There's a few things that can cause this. Can you run xfburn in a terminal, recreate the situation (error) and post the output from the terminal?

[seppalta]

"me@8710w-2:~$ xfburn
** Message: Using UDEV

** (xfburn:2721): WARNING **: A pipeline element could not be created" ,
and a pop-up:    "Failed to initialize gstreamer transcoder: An error occurred setting gstreamer up for transcoding
   (falling back to basic implementation)" .

Closed the pop-up, loaded a blank and an iso, and everything was set to burn.   Tried it with a second computer with the same result.  From a sample of 2, it would appear that I can circumvent the problem by launching xfburn from the terminal instead of the menu.  Good to know, but ....   ?

[MoroS]

I wish I had better news, but it seems a Debian bug, that mainly affects 32-bit systems. No wonder I couldn't recreate the problem (AMD64). Are you on a 32-bit system?

Details here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=770283

[seppalta]

No, I'm on 64-bit!?

[MoroS]

...it would appear that I can circumvent the problem by launching xfburn from the terminal instead of the menu...

Missed that part. Now this is really strange. Running from GUI makes the problem persist, running from a terminal creates a workaround (with the message still being displayed). Combining that with the bug report for Debian's bug tracker, we get an image of a non-deterministic bug in xfburn, that has yet to be found. Some traces from the bug report seem to lead towards a GTK bug, which adds even more confusion (but is convenietly relative to your problem when running from GUI).

Maybe I'll try to build a custom xfburn package with the problematic part modified. There's an 'if' instruction checking 5 different things with an 'or' expression, so if any of them is true, then this warning appears. That's a really poor programming practice as without debugging you can't trace the problem to the specific condition causing it. Anyway, I don't have much free time, so it can take a while until I create that package, so please stick to the workaround for a while.