Bug#668837: gstreamer0.10-plugins-good: GStreamer stops decoding in the middle of a flac

[Jason Rhinelander]

I'm seeing the same issue (though I can't distribute the FLAC in 
question), using the latest sid version (0.10.31-3).

I did a little more debugging on this; using gstreamer0.10-tools, this 
command reproduces the error, with the gstreamer debugging suggesting a 
problem:

gst-launch-0.10 --gst-debug-level=2 filesrc 
location=10-machinae_supremacy-cryosleep.flac ! flacparse ! flacdec ! 
pulsesink

Just before the track finishes prematurely, there's this:

0:00:58.040476180  4864      0x148dad0 WARN               flacparse 
gstflacparse.c:576:gst_flac_parse_frame_header_is_valid:<flacparse0> 
Block size is not constant
0:00:58.040721771  4864      0x148dad0 WARN                 flacdec 
gstflacdec.c:419:gst_flac_dec_scan_got_frame:<flacdec0> Variable block 
size FLAC unsupported
0:00:58.040971058  4864      0x148dad0 WARN               flacparse 
gstflacparse.c:576:gst_flac_parse_frame_header_is_valid:<flacparse0> 
Block size is not constant

The last one gets repeated a few thousand times, then playback stops. 
For my file I get the same errors and result.  For both Anton's file and 
my file, the FLAC has no errors or warnings when run with flac -t, and 
plays perfectly with non-gstreamer players.

(Note that replacing the final "pulsesink" in the above command with 
"fakesink" lets you see the errors without having to wait 58 seconds).

I tried analyzing both FLAC files using ``flac -a filename.flac'', for 
both my file and Anton's file.  The resulting .ana analysis file shows 
that every frame except the very last one has blocksize=4096, so the 
error appears at least misleading, perhaps indicating some flac decoding 
or parsing error in gstreamer.

I also tried installing the gstreamer1.0 packages, and trying the above 
with gst-launch-1.0; exactly the same errors occurred.

After reading Anton's suggestion that he thinks it was working a couple 
months ago, I tried installing 0.10.30-2.1, but that still has the 
problem (though the "Block size is not constant" error doesn't get 
reported--that check was added upstream since then).

Jason Rhinelander