[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] avcodec/snowdec: Check ld/cbd/crd

Michael Niedermayer michael at niedermayer.cc
Mon Sep 4 12:48:34 EEST 2017


On Mon, Sep 04, 2017 at 12:57:32AM +0000, Kieran Kunhya wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Sep 2017 at 00:56 Michael Niedermayer <michael at niedermayer.cc>
> wrote:
> 
> > We have always printed error messages for the case that an error
> > occured.
> > Its unprofessional to fail decoding a file but not provide any
> > hint as to why a failure occured.
> >
> > If we remove all error messages and just print a generic "failed
> > decoding header" or "failed to decode frame"
> > We would leave users wondering about each error and we would no longer
> > have differentiated bug reports.
> > There would be one very huge bug report about
> > "Error while decoding stream #0:0: Invalid data found when processing
> > input"
> > Because thats all detail the user can get if the message is not in the
> > binary.
> > That bug report then would be marked invalid of course and would help
> > neither users nor developers.
> >
> 
> We ask users to report bugs with "--loglevel 99" so this is irrelevant if
> it's a DEBUG.

yes, true


> 
> 
> > Iam not sure why error messages are since about a year or so
> > considered controversial by some developers but not before
> >
> 
> In my case I get a lot of reports from users about ffmpeg spamming logs
> with obscure warnings.
> This happens on legal files as per my "SPS/PPS truncation" patch which
> scares them into thinking the file is broken.
> 
> The same goes with spamming logs when there is some data corruption with
> warnings which are very obscure.

The messages from libavcodec are by the nature of it quite technical.
Does showing these messages to your users have any value for them at
all ?

AV_LOG_ERROR is documented as
    /**
    * Something went wrong and cannot losslessly be recovered.
    * However, not all future data is affected.
    */
    #define AV_LOG_ERROR    16

This matches the case its used in.

I am not against using DEBUG level for detailed error messages, and
ERROR for generic ones if thats what more people prefer.
But for this to achive any usefull effect it has to be done
consistently accross the codebase. ATM we more commonly use
AV_LOG_ERROR for these.

[...]
-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

Take away the freedom of one citizen and you will be jailed, take away
the freedom of all citizens and you will be congratulated by your peers
in Parliament.
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