GStreamer-CRITICAL **: gst_debug_log_valist: assertion `category != NULL' failed?

Question

How might I chase down the root cause of this error message?

(test:1090): GStreamer-CRITICAL **: gst_debug_log_valist: assertion `category != NULL' failed

I am using --gst-debug=GST_REFCOUNTING:5 to debug intermittent issues in the code that can take more than 10 hours to reproduce. The pipeline seems to work fine even with the gst-debug error message. Should I be concerned about the GStreamer-CRITICAL error message?

Answer 1

What I usually do is run the program in gdb with a G_DEBUG=fatal-criticals environment variable (see the Running GLib Applications section of the GLib manual) in gdb and use gdb to get a backtrace... something like

G_DEBUG=fatal-criticals gdb -ex run --args ./test arg1 arg2 ...

If you don't want to actually run the program in gdb you can use a core dump instead.

Once you get a trace you should be able to find the offending code fairly easily. The message might be harmless and/or an issue internal to GStreamer, but I would at least check it out if I were you... criticals like that are often an indicator of a serious issue, like a segfault waiting to happen.

Note that the 1090 in that message likely refers to the PID, not a line number in the generated C.

Answer 2

It looks like this message is trying to tell you that there's a gstreamer log message somewhere in the code that simply lacks a category (one like GST_REFCOUNTING or ). As you only want to see log messages concerning GST_REFCOUNTING messages gstreamer can't be sure whether or not this specific message is important or not. Unless you've written your own plugin or called some of the Logging functions yourself, I'd guess this is most likely an issue of gstreamer itself or one of its plugins.

But it's not one that should cause any trouble other than ill-categorized log messages