Failed to write to the destination directory.

[Ghodmode Development]

I'm trying to use Devede to create a DVD with subtitles.  When I add the subtitles, it doesn't work and reports the error "Failed to write to the destination directory.  Check that you have privileges and free space there."

It works fine without subtitles.

There was a similar problem reported in a previous thread "Error on Windows 7 32-bit"  I think I'm having the same problem and I'm using Linux.  Here's the link from the previous thread: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/devede-forum/y1kwuCc7t5k/lsMa7WNi7hgJ

Both the path for the temporary files and the destination path for the resulting files are on the same partition and there's 22G available.

Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit
devede 3.21.0-1~rastersoft1
mencoder 2:1.0~rc4.dfsg1+svn33713-1
ffmpeg 4:0.7.2-1ubuntu1
iconv (Ubuntu EGLIBC 2.13-20ubuntu5) 2.13

Thank you.

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Ghodmode
http://www.ghodmode.com/blog

[Ghodmode Development]

I think I've solved this problem on my own.  Earlier I captured the output of running devede from the console in a file.  There's a lot of output, but I was able to find some useful information by cross-referencing with the code files from github.

The command that was failing is iconv and when I run it manually, it reports this error:

    iconv: illegal input sequence at position 151

So, there's a character in the file that iconv doesn't like and that's what's causing the problem with the subtitles.  Since the problem only occurs with subtitle files that have some kind of problem, it has probably made it difficult to reproduce.

I looked at the man page for iconv and found that I could work around the problem if I convert the file manually and append //IGNORE to the --to-code argument before running devede that this problem goes away.

This quote from the man page tells why:

       //IGNORE
              When the string "//IGNORE" is appended to --to-code, characters that cannot be represented in the target character set will be
              silently discarded.

I don't think there's much that could be done to correct the problem automatically, but changing the wording of the error message might be helpful.  I suggest "Subtitle format conversion failed.  Your subtitles file may be formatted incorrectly." ... at or around line 75 of devede_subtitles.py.

Unfortunately, there's a new problem "Conversion failed.  It seems a bug of SPUMUX.", but that should be a separate thread.

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Ghodmode
http://www.ghodmode.com/blog