a possible bug in gstreamer?

[kendell clark]

hi all

I'm a new user to this list, having just signed up about a month ago. My 
name is Kendell clark, and I've been a gnu linux user since august of 
2011. I am visually impaired, and work with the vinux project, which is 
an accessible linux distro for those who need assistive technologies, 
such as the orca screen reader, on board on screen keyboard, and 
magnification, as well as other programs. I am also not a programmer, 
yet. However, I use linux every day and want to help improve some of the 
best code I've ever had the pleasure of using, and that is gstreamer. 
I'd like to report what I think might, maybe, be a bug or two in 
gstreamer. First, in opening the matroska video file format (.mkv    ). 
In totem, which is actually called videos now, attempting to open a mkv 
file results in the following error.

"an error occurred internal data stream error."

This is, I believe a gstreamer error, because although other video 
players which use gstreamer such as parole, will open these files, it 
brings the system to it's knees with artifacts and general lag. If it 
helps, which I'm not sure if it does or not, these are videos downloaded 
from youtube with youtube-dl and converted with ffmpeg automatically. 
I'm using a dell inspiron n7010 with a quad core processor, and 6 gb of 
ram, so I'm pretty sure but not positive it's not a hardware issue. 
Second, there's a problem in a program for converting audio called sound 
converter. It uses gstreamer to convert audio files from one format to 
another and strip the audio out of video files. This is a hard bug to 
track down, but it's simple to reproduce. Open a folder with lots of 
files, or lots of folders with lots of files, in other words, lots of 
subdirectories with lots of audio or video files. The application will 
be slow to parse the file list, but will eventually complete. However, 
after pressing the convert button it will simply stop. It acts as if it 
is converting but isn't actually doing anything. The only reason I think 
these might be gstreamer bugs is because these bugs started happening 
with the last release of gstreamer 1.x, version 1.12.0-1. If it helps, 
I'm running antergos 2017.06, completely up to date. I'd like to help 
diagnose this problem and also help fix it. If it's not a gstreamer 
problem I apologize, but would appreciate pointers to these project's 
respective bug reporting pages if it's not a gstreamer error. Lastly, 
opening these mkv files in vlc media player works fine, but as far as I 
know it doesn't use gstreamer, which is further evidence of a possible 
gstreamer bug. Before I go, I have the good, bad and ugly plugin sets 
installed, and will gladly help debug, send debug logs, whatever is 
needed as long as it doesn't require writing code. I can't do taht yet, 
but I'm trying to learn.


Appreciate any help.

Thanks

Kendell Clark