A request for sane error messages when the destionation hard drive is full

Started by Who, June 08, 2022, 10:31:12 PM

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Who

Just a request that if you try to save an encoding to a volume and the hard drive is full, please let the error message actually say that instead of something nonsensical like

Too short

The saved video is incomplete. The error occured (sic) at 00:00:09,509 (0). This may happen as result of invalid time stamps in the video.


So I spent HOURS trying to figure out why a video would have invalid timestamps, and why suddenly Avidemux wouldn't encode anything, even projects it had been able to do before. I was even starting to wonder if my computer was damaged in some way.  But as it turned out, the reason was that although I had deleted a bunch of files, I hadn't emptied the trash in awhile!

Once I emptied the trash everything started working fine again, but I wasted way too much time trying to figure out what was wrong, all because I was thinking that for some strange reason the time stamps had been corrupted. At the VERY least, you could change the wording of the error to say "... This may happen as result of invalid time stamps in the video, or because the destination volume has no remaining free space."

And if Avidemux were really proactive about it, when you go to save something it could pop up a warning text when you have less than a predefined amount of space remaining on the destination volume, for example I would think less than 10 GB left would be a could place to warn.  Then have a button to click when you are ready to proceed, either because you have deleted some files and/or emptied the trash, or because you know the saved file should be shorter than the remaining space.

Thanks for your consideration. And yeah, maybe I'm an idiot, but I can't be the only idiot that has ever forgotten that files in the trashcan still take up space!

eumagga0x2a

Thanks for catching the typo.

Quote from: Who on June 08, 2022, 10:31:12 PMAt the VERY least, you could change the wording of the error to say "... This may happen as result of invalid time stamps in the video, or because the destination volume has no remaining free space."

Such an approach doesn't scale as except for lack of free disk space, a myriad of reasons can result in a failure to save video. The current error message correctly mentions the most frequently enountered problem. It doesn't state that invalid time stamps were the reason, they may have been the reason.

Nevertheless, the current state of error reporting to non-expert users who are not expected to seek for answers in Avidemux log, is not defendable. This topic is on my todo list.