Two categories of error can affect TealPlay. The first category consists of errors that TealPlay can detect and handle, which are often the result of issues with the media library or the TealPlay Python code itself. The second category of error comes from the QtMultimedia framework, which isn't always entirely stable. TealPlay cannot easily detect or recover from errors in QtMultimedia.
To troubleshoot library issues and other detectable errors, use the TealPlay Log Viewer, which can be accessed by navigating to Help...View Log. Any library warnings or errors will be displayed in the log output. Note that most library errors are reported only at scan time, so rescanning the library might be necessary to see these errors if TealPlay has been freshly started.
More detailed debugging messages can be enabled by changing the log level. Log level
changes can be done at program start time if running from the command line, by passing the
--verbose or --debug option to TealPlay. However, log level
changes can also be accomplished from the Log Viewer window. Simply go to Edit...Log Level
and change the level there. The most verbose messages will be displayed with the Debug
level, while the least verbose messages will be displayed with the Critical level. Re-run
the action that produced the error (such as rescanning the library) after changing the log
level to inspect the log messages. If the log window is left open, use Edit...Refresh (or
press F5) to update its contents.
Should it be necessary to send a log report to the developers, there are two ways to save the log output. The first is to use File...Save As to save the log to an HTML file. Alternatively, File...Print can be used on most systems to save a PDF version of the log. Note that the TealPlay log is never saved automatically. This design decision is a privacy feature, since an automatically saved log is easily recoverable using forensic tools and could reveal information about your media habits to an adversary.
TealPlay uses QtMultimedia via Qt for Python. This multimedia framework is not always stable, particularly if the media files contain too many errors (which occurs, for example, when receiving live TV from an antenna with imperfect reception). While TealPlay attempts to mitigate as many of this issues as possible, some freezes and crashes are likely to occur. Simply force quit TealPlay using your window manager and restart it when these issues happen.
In the long term, we plan to migrate away from QtMultimedia to something that will (hopefully) be more stable. For the time being, greater stability can be expected from local media files when compared to live media.