Sorting order bug with videos in nautilus

#1

Hi,
I’ve this bug for months but I was not sure it was in nautilus, I had a look on gitlab issues and couldn’t find something similar, which is weird, so I report here before just in case it was already reported.

Description of the issue:
When I have 3 videos in the same folder for example named “video1”, “video2”, “video3” ordered A-Z, if I open them with totem all 3, it starts by “video3”, then “video2” then “video1”
if I change the view to list and reverse ordering few weeks ago it was working, since the last update it works in normal order. The results are differents if I use vlc instead of totem, so for a while I thought it was a bug in totem, but today I was playing with dconf and have activated “use-experimental-views” in /org/gnome/nautilus/preferences and now it’s working fine with totem and it is not if I do “select another application” and choose totem (start by last video) or vlc (random start) this way.

I use fedora 30 x86_64 kernel 5.3.11-200 and nautilus 3.32.3-stable provided by default repos.
How can I fix it, or help to fix it, or do nothing if already reported please. thx

#2

I use Nautilus 3.34.1 (Debian unstable) and noticed some unexpected behaviour:

  • “Open with Other Application” looks correct, all items are shown or play and in the correct order
  • “Open with Default Application” sometimes (depending on the application) apparently plays only one of the selected items (but which one looks random) or all items are shown, but out of order
  • the same application behaves differently when invoked via “Open with Default” and “Open with Other”

I think we’re both are victims of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/117

There are indeed different code paths in Nautilus for these actions:

  • “Open with Other” calls the application once with several arguments (if the application is DBus-activable then there’s one call to the “open” method with a list of URLs)
  • “Open with Default” calls the application multiple times with one aragument (in the DBus case there are multiple “open” calls with one URL each)

It depends on the application, how it handles the latter case (i.e. being called with a new URL when one item is already playing):

  • VLC adds the URLs to its playlist and plays the first; due to race conditions this may explain the random ordering
  • Totem (DBus-activated) abandons the current playing item and plays the new one (so you may effectively see only one item playing)
  • Gedit (DBus-activated) adds a new tab with the item
1 Like
#3

Thank you very much, I’ve looked at issues but couldn’t find this one. Now I understand the problem.