Arch Linux

AbtZ

Member

Registered: 2008-05-30

Posts: 31

Mplayer can't play files with spaces in their name

After scratching my head and reinstalling codecs several times without luck, and old memory resurfaced of this occuring before and I managed to solve the problem.

The thing is that if you doubleclick a file in Nautilus, and said files has spaces in its name, mplayer won't be able to play it, and gives a very cryptic error message, ie "cannot play file a%20b.avi" if the name of the file is "a b.avi".

The trick is mentioned in this thread -- you edit /usr/share/applications/mplayer.desktop and change 'Exec=gmplayer %U' to 'Exec=gmplayer %F'.

The bug has been around forever, and hasn't been fixed yet. Perhaps the mplayer devs don't want to fix it. In any case, I would propose that either we fix this in the mplayer Arch package, or that someone more knowledgeable than I get in touch with the devs about it.

Just a suggestion, but I think it's kind of important. It's really confusing to new users.

qdiesel

Member

Registered: 2008-05-19

Posts: 61

Re: Mplayer can't play files with spaces in their name

I don't think that's mplayer's bug. It's rather Nautilus' fault because when I ran gmplayer along with KDE I've never had such troubles.

wonder

Developer

From: Bucharest, Romania

Registered: 2006-07-05

Posts: 5,941

Website

Re: Mplayer can't play files with spaces in their name

there is a bug open for this issue: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/12113

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Mr.Elendig

#archlinux@freenode channel op

From: The intertubes

Registered: 2004-11-07

Posts: 4,092

Re: Mplayer can't play files with spaces in their name

In my opinion, it it's not arch's job to fix bugs from upstream, no matter if it's mplayer or gnome's fault. Of course there are exceptions, eg if a bug in a critical package hardlocks the whole system, or adds a huge security risk.
I would like to belive that the general arch user is smart enough to find one of the 30 threads about this bug (or the entry on the bugtracker) and fix it themselves. Personaly I would put this in the same category as packages that don't have a .desktop file at all from upstream.

Oh, and as a small sidenote: http://phraktured.net/patching-patching-patching.html

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AbtZ

Member

Registered: 2008-05-30

Posts: 31

Re: Mplayer can't play files with spaces in their name

You do have a valid point. However, the nature of the very cryptic error message leads one to believe it's a codec problem, which is quite misleading. I got quite annoyed that I wasted so much time trying to fix a codec error that didn't exist.

If it is Arch's stance to not do anything about it, I don't have much else to say on the subject. The issue is not overly important, no, but it could oh so easily become a non-issue since the fix is so easy to apply. This is the reason I brought it up here in the first place.

jmrbcu

Member

From: Cuba

Registered: 2007-08-20

Posts: 112

Re: Mplayer can't play files with spaces in their name

just replace the line Exec=gmplayer %U with Exec=gmplayer %F in: /usr/share/applications/mplayer.desktop

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Todos somos muy ignorantes, lo que ocurre es que no todos ignoramos lo mismo.
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