touch-packages team mailing list archive

[James Henstridge <james.henstridge@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Pat: the underlying problem is that there are bugs in some of the media
codecs when faced with invalid files.  The bug was deprioritised in
mediascanner2 (but not GStreamer!) is because we added code to mitigate
the problem by making the media scanner service not rescan a file that
caused it to crash previously.

We do have a plan to improve this further in a way that will stop the
errors showing up for media scanner.  Basically:

1. separate the metadata extraction into a separate process.
2. add this process to the apport blacklist
3. have the media scanner service use the out of process metadata extractor

We haven't been working on this in the short term (i.e. RTM time frame)
because it is a fairly disruptive change and we already have a
mitigation strategy in place.  Further more, any file that crashes media
scanner will almost definitely crash the media player too (hence the
GStreamer bug task).

Note also that there is unlikely to be a single fix that will stop all
future crashes: we will likely continue to find files that cause the
codecs to crash as time goes on (and since we have hardware decoders, we
will likely find files that only crash on particular devices).  If we
want to be methodical about this, one strategy would be to:

1. put together a collection of problem media files.
2. write a test harness that will attempt to decode each file and record any crashes (ideally with stack traces if applicable).
3. run this test suite on the devices we care about (desktop, mako, krillin, etc) at regular intervals
4. when new codec crashers are discovered, add those media files to the collection so we can ensure that we don't regress (and have more test cases for when we bring up a new device).

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to mediascanner2 in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1364466

Title:
  /usr/bin/mediascanner-service-2.0:*** Error in `mediascanner-
  service-2.0': double free or corruption (fasttop): ADDR ***

Status in “gstreamer” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in “mediascanner2” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  The Ubuntu Error Tracker has been receiving reports about a problem
  regarding mediascanner2.  This problem was most recently seen with
  version 0.104+14.10.20140825-0ubuntu1, the problem page at
  https://errors.ubuntu.com/problem/354f10fdaba609ee33dd0a2868637ec79c590b56
  and
  https://errors.ubuntu.com/problem/01fcf2789e27c0abf6922c68c02a408b907fab83
  contains more details.

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