File misparsing

[rharwood@…]

We have now discovered 5 files (which I can provide upon request for testing purposes only) which do not properly play when queued. The player takes a long file and scans at seemingly random intervals through the file, playing small chunks. When mplayer is called in isolation (on the machine running gutenbach) on the file, it plays correctly; when all of the flags we pass mplayer are added, it continues to play correctly. HOWEVER, when tries to play a copy of the file from the spool, it does not play correctly. An md5 hash and diff show the spooled file and the actual file to be the same. When we remove the output quieting from the mplayer call, we see that it is misparsing the file format for the file in the spool (seems to be parsing an mp3 as MPEG ps). When we rename the file to include the correct extension, the file plays correctly in mplayer.

[jhamrick]

This may become obsolete once we finish the new IPP server, but I haven't investigated thoroughly so it may be something else unrelated.

[jhamrick]

From Colin:

Renaming the file with a .mp3 extension made it play fine (this seems to be an mplayer bug), so I have a potential fix making the playing script just symlink the file to something with the same extension as the original, using the exif magic (or the job name if that fails). Attached a (sort of hacky) diff for the backend script.

From Jess:

We can definitely make sure to preserve extensions in the new IPP server, so for now we could implement this fix and then it will automatically be dealt with once we roll over to the new server.