VLC does not open files with Plus-signs in name

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Unfortunately we can't fix it, because your description didn't include enough information. You may find it helpful to read "How to report bugs effectively" http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html. We'd be grateful if you would then provide a more complete description of the problem.
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1. the specific steps or actions you took that caused you to encounter the problem,
2. the behavior you expected, and
3. the behavior you actually encountered (in as much detail as possible).
Thanks!

I simply installed Ubuntu 8.04b.

After upgrading a few days ago, it stopped working.

There is nothing I did

Just right click and select Open with "VLC media player"

I did not change anything.

And it keeps doing it ever since thursday

I can reconfirm the bug in Ubuntu Hardy. If you right click any avi file and select "open with vlc" for playing it gives an error cannot open the file.... even if the volume is mounted. The same file can be opened using vlc's menu.

I hit this bug again, and I would say it represents a major usability problem for VLC, itself a prime desktop app.

VLC does a 'dumb' substitution of the '+' symbol with space in the source, which breaks URL parsing; I expect this was added as a hack previously, when apps didn't use '%20' to represent the space in an RFC-compliant manner.

Fix is thus:

--- src/input/input.c~ 2008-08-25 12:37:44.943073369 +0100
+++ src/input/input.c 2008-08-25 12:37:44.948073326 +0100
@@ -2420,11 +2420,6 @@

             *psz++ = strtol( val, NULL, 16 );
         }
- else if( *p == '+' )
- {
- *psz++ = ' ';
- p++;
- }
         else
         {
             *psz++ = *p++;

Here is an Debdiff with your patch included

Fantastic to have the debdiff too...how do we get a MOTU developer to review and, if it looks good, upload an updated package?

we are just subscribe them to this bug. Can you test my debdiff?

Testing the debdiff, it corrects the behaviour of URL parsing with a '+' sign. Looks good!

Since this bug has been filed and confirmed, 0.9.x has been introduced in Intrepid. Does this release resolve the issue?

As for Hardy, I agree this is a bug that should be fixed particularly since the fix is so simple. However, the above patch needs to be reformatted as a StableReleaseUpdate:

(1) The target should be against "hardy-proposed" with a clearly-worded concise description of the bug fixed, along with a (LP: 123456) link back to this bug.

(2) The patch should use the native patch system in the VLC package.

If you are interested in making those changes for sponsorship, please do so. If you aren't, please let us know so someone else can take a stab at it.

Thanks for your detective work, everyone.

Upstream removed affected code due to a function duplication (see http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=commitdiff;h=6b5014ade2790fa8aa9dae1205e38b755525162b). Is it still relevant with newer versions?

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!

This patch is not relevant in the new version; the new URL handling doesn't special-case the '+' symbol like it did (brokenly) previously.