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[mwillems]

So starting yesterday after an update to 26.0.27, I noticed that MC on Windows would fail to play a video and then freeze.  Specifically, launching the video would play sound, but the screen would just show a black screen.  At that point MC becomes hung and will not respond to any remote button presses or keypresses (i.e. I can't just stop playback or switch to standard view with Ctrl-1).  Eventually MC shows the "not responding" window and that's the only way to exit the program at that point.

I did some differential diagnosis.  It seems to happen with Red October HQ and Theater View together.  Some notes:

1) I can reproduce it easily when launching video from theater view, it happens reliably the second time I launch a video (i.e. launch a video, press stop, launch another to get black screen hang).  I can't reliably reproduce it when launching video from standard view, although I managed to reproduce it once that way.
2) I can reproduce it with Red October HQ on any of the three default quality settings, but not with Red October Standard at all.  Also, I noted that my MadVR plugin folder was updated within the last few days, which is suggestive.  Deleting the plugin folder and allowing MC to redownload the components did not fix the issue.
3) Downgrading to MC 26.0.22 doesn't change the behavior, even though I was using 22 for a while with no problems before. 
4) The machine in question is an old i7 2600K with an nvidia 960 GTX.  I tried updating the video drivers with no effect.  It has been happily running Red October HQ on "best quality" settings for a while now.

So is anybody else seeing any issues with video playback with Red October HQ and/or Theater View recently? 

[mattkhan]

I did two upgrades yesterday (27 and then 28) and since then I'm getting a lot of problems on video playback & I do use ROHQ. Theatre View not involved for me but I notice that it only occurs once I go into display mode (i.e. full screen).

I have windows set to kill the MC process when it gets a resource exhaustion event because of long standing issues with a memory leak when using the WDM driver. This is kicking in regularly, but not consistently, when I start video playback. The log shows some errors, but nothing conclusive, including

Unhandled DX event: 0xfa17

which gives 1 and only 1 google hit, a thread here some time ago -> https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=92681.0

No changes to madvr here during this period, haven't changed that in months.

Do you see anything in Event Viewer about resource exhaustion events?

[mwillems]

No resource exhaustion events in event viewer, just errors related to the hangs and force closures (event viewer describes it as a "cross-thread" hang).  For me the issue seems tightly coupled with theater view FWIW, I have almost no problems when starting playback from standard view.  It seems like the switch out of whatever full-screen exclusive mode theater view is using is triggering the issue with MadVR here.  I suppose I should try and generate some logs at this point.

[Hendrik]

Theater View doesn't use exclusive mode, and there should have been no changes recently to how it works, as far as I am aware.
madVR also wasn't updated.

If downgrading to a previously-good version does not fix it, then its likely not something we changed.

[JimH]

Antivirus?

[mwillems]

Theater View doesn't use exclusive mode, and there should have been no changes recently to how it works, as far as I am aware.
madVR also wasn't updated.

If downgrading to a previously-good version does not fix it, then its likely not something we changed.

The machine is only used for JRiver, so the only other thing that could have changed is a windows update, I guess that's my next avenue of investigation.  In that vein, I spotted two almost identical issues to this one in the weird and wonderful problems thread (sudden black screen failure of MadVR) and they were related to Windows updates.  If that's the issue though, I'm not sure what to do about it as windows updates are hard to avoid for any length of time in windows 10. 

Antivirus?

I only use window defender and had already worked through all the "Taming" steps.  I went through the exclusions list again just to make sure, but no dice. 

[tij]

I am on 27 ... running RO HQ ... everything seems to work (I do run MadVR 0.92.17 ... instead of 0.92.16 supplied with MC due to queue filling problems)

Also on 425.31 NVidia driver ... antivirus is bitDefender

EDIT: I don’t use full screen exclusive (fse) with MadVR  ... win10 does not support it ... and therefore it’s buggy most of time

[tzr916]

When I had similar issues, it turned out to be DIRECT SOUND got set, I changed (back) to WASAPI and it cleared right up. The other thing - I found on two nvidia machines, one of the latest windows updates ignored the settings to NOT update the video card driver. Had to manually roll back to the driver I know works.

Running 26.0.27 in theater view ROHQ no problems here.

[TheShoe]

I am on 27 ... running RO HQ ... everything seems to work (I do run MadVR 0.92.17 ... instead of 0.92.16 supplied with MC due to queue filling problems)

Also on 425.31 NVidia driver ... antivirus is bitDefender

EDIT: I don’t use full screen exclusive (fse) with MadVR  ... win10 does not support it ... and therefore it’s buggy most of time

same configuration here.  MC v.27, MadVR 0.92.17 and same nVidia drivers.  Also not using FSE and have not had issues, either launching from Theater View or from default view.

I recently also upgraded to Windows 1909.

[mwillems]

So paddling around further, I found that not all my zones exhibit the problem, which led me to try a bunch of different setups.  I eventually narrowed it down to some kind of issue with using my soundcard (a Steinberg UR824) in ASIO mode.  All the zones that were exhibiting the issue were using the Stenberg in ASIO mode, and if I copy one of the misbehaving zones and change the sound device to a different device (or to the Steinberg in WASAPI mode), I can no longer reproduce the issue. 

The problem, of course, is that I can't access all eight channels of output on the Steinberg except in ASIO mode and, of course, everything has worked perfectly for years up until now.  I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the Steinberg drivers, with no change in behavior.

I generated a log that exhibited the crash, FWIW,  in case there are any clues there.  There definitely appear to be some directx/madVR errors and a number of audio errors, but I'm not sure how significant they are.

[JimH]

Thanks for the detective work.