[Pkg-bluetooth-maintainers] Bug#571595: a2dpsink should have a rank < GST_RANK_MARGINAL

[Sebastian Dröge]

Package: bluez-gstreamer
Severity: important

Hi,
currently the a2dpsink GStreamer element of bluez-gstreamer has a rank
of GST_RANK_MARGINAL. This means that it can be automatically chosen by
GStreamer for audio output *without* any additional setup.

The last part unfortunately isn't the case here, a2dpsink requires the
device property to be set to the bluetooth device which should be used.
Not setting that property results in a failure.

To explain why this is a real problem let's consider a small example
(which actually was reported against GStreamer upstream):
You have bluez-gstreamer installed as part of the GNOME metapackage but
you don't have a MP3 decoder plugin installed. Now you try to play a MP3
file with totem. Totem now detects that there is no MP3 decoder but a
sink (a2dpsink) which can accept MP3 data, this is then chosen and tried
and then fails because no device was set. This wouldn't happen if
a2dpsink had a smaller rank. In that case Totem would start the
GStreamer codec installer and ask the user to install
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly or another package that provides a MP3
decoder.

I'm not sure if important is the correct severity here, it might even be
higher because it breaks other, more or less unrelated software.



Ubuntu has a patch for this, you should apply it too. But you might
change the MARGINAL-1 to GST_RANK_NONE instead but this doesn't really
make a difference ;)

> diff -pruN 4.60-1/debian/patches/02_lower_sink_ranking.patch 4.60-0ubuntu5/debian/patches/02_lower_sink_ranking.patch
> --- 4.60-1/debian/patches/02_lower_sink_ranking.patch	1970-01-01 01:00:00.000000000 +0100
> +++ 4.60-0ubuntu5/debian/patches/02_lower_sink_ranking.patch	2010-02-26 04:33:53.000000000 +0000
> @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
> +diff -Nur -x '*.orig' -x '*~' bluez-4.51/audio/gsta2dpsink.c bluez-4.51.new/audio/gsta2dpsink.c
> +--- bluez-4.51/audio/gsta2dpsink.c	2009-07-06 22:21:40.000000000 +0200
> ++++ bluez-4.51.new/audio/gsta2dpsink.c	2009-09-24 23:12:05.000000000 +0200
> +@@ -698,6 +698,6 @@
> + gboolean gst_a2dp_sink_plugin_init(GstPlugin *plugin)
> + {
> + 	return gst_element_register(plugin, "a2dpsink",
> +-			GST_RANK_MARGINAL, GST_TYPE_A2DP_SINK);
> ++			GST_RANK_MARGINAL-1, GST_TYPE_A2DP_SINK);
> + }
> + 
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