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[darichman]

I've been using MC 12.0.7.6 for a few days now and have experienced a number of issues with stability

1. MC will sometimes hang and can only be terminated by ctrl-alt-del-ing and selecting end task or killing the process. I have often waited upwards of 30min (and once or twice overnight) to make sure the program wasn't still trying to do something (tagging etc).

    Specific times I've come across this behaviour: Importing & tagging videos
       Changing or editing view schemes
       During or after "Add Folder to Library"

I have tried turning off plugins, use the default skin etc

2. When I close MC (the normal way!), I can't start up the program again (usually have to wait 10 min or so...). When I go into task manager, the MC process is still running. This is not related to MC finishing off a tagging process or anything ~ usually happens when I haven't even touched the tags. If I want to start up MC again in a hurry, I have to kill the process...

3. I mentioned this in the release thread, but is also kinda relevant here. MC crashes or hangs when I try to build missing thumbnails. I use ffdshow, and often get up to 5 or 6 icons in the taskbar (my guess is MC is using ffdshow to pull the thumbnails from video files). Once again, have left the process to run overnight to finish building thumbnails, but MC is non-responsive the next morning and most thumbnails are still missing.

Overall, love the new features (especially video related) and can't wait till it's rock solid.

Media Center Registered 12.0.76 -- C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 12\

Microsoft Windows XP  Workstation 5.1 Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
Intel Pentium 4 1800 MHz MMX / Memory: Total - 785 MB, Free - 306 MB

Internet Explorer: 6.0.2900.2180 / ComCtl32.dll: 5.82.2900 / Shlwapi.dll: 6.0.2900 / Shell32.dll: 6.0.2900 / wnaspi32.dll: N/A
Ripping /   Drive I: PIONEER DVD-RW  DVR-106D  Mode:ModeSecure  Type:Auto  Speed:Max
  Digital playback: Yes /  Use YADB: Yes /  Get cover art: No /  Calc replay gain: Yes /  Copy volume: 32767
  Eject after ripping: Yes /  Play sound after ripping: Yes  Soundfile:   chord.wav

Burning /  Drive I: PIONEER  DVD-RW  DVR-106D   Addr: 1:0:0  Speed:16  MaxSpeed:16  BurnProof:Yes
  Test mode: No /  Eject after writing: Yes /  Direct decoding: Yes /  Write CD-Text: Yes
  Use playback settings: No /

[Alex B]

3. (and possibly 1. and 2. too)

As you guessed, this is most likely related to video thumbnail buiding. I too have experienced crashes. (http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=34961.0)

You could try to erase all thumbals, turn logging with all options on and after a restart go directly to the video category. If/when MC crashes send the log to Yaobing ( yaobing at jriver dot com ) before starting MC again. You can find the log here: C:\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Application Data\J River\Media Center 12\log.txt (assuming C: is your system drive).

[JimH]

The log is also available under MC Help/Logging.  It would be the "Previous" log there.

[glynor]

I have recently switched from the 20051129 build of FFDSHOW to the one included with CCCP (which is from July 2006 I think), and have found it much more stable when building thumbs (specifically with the 12.0.76 build of MC).  I also am not having audio problems with DVD playback anymore that I was with the 20051129 build of FFDSHOW.

If you're still using the older build and having hard-locks of MC when building thumbs (or DVD playback audio problems), you might want to 1) uninstall DirectVobSub if you have it, as it is known to cause problems, and 2) switch to either CCCP or a newer build of FFDSHOW from Celtic Druid.

I am having this issue with Thumbnail building now though.  I don't know if it is related to the new FFDSHOW or the new MC build though...

[darichman]

Alex & Jim:

I've emailed Yaobing with a log file after doing what you suggested. I hope I did this right I opened up MC, selected "reset log" from the help menu and then started clicking randomly on some of my video view schemes. Sure enough, the program became unresponsive. I waited a few minutes, then chose to end the program manually through the task menu.

Glynor:

I'm downloading CCCP right now. Thanks for the advice.

[JimH]

Changes in tonight's build may affect your problem.  Are you using it?

[darichman]

No!

Will download and see if there's a difference. Thanks Jim.

[glynor]

While I haven't been having what I'm calling "thumbnailing related hard locks" since I resolved some of my codec problems (and with the newer builds of MC)... I have been having a fair amount instability with recent builds.

Quite often when I open a View Scheme, or one of the "child" views in the Tree, MC will completely crash on me.  It also occasionlly happens when I play a file for the first time.  MC does not hard lock on me as it was doing before in these cases, but crashes and gives an error message (sometimes these error messages come up over and over 3-4 times before MC crashes completely and I get the "windows crash report" dialog).  These "first" set of errors seem to be an MC-generated dialogs (as they are skinned like MC and have the MC icon in their task bar "tab").

They do also give me the opportunity to copy the error info to my clipboard.  I've posted one of these errors, but I'm not sure if this is useful info so I've not continued to do so, and just stick to posting the MC logs if I can.

It is entirely possible that these are related somehow to thumbnailing and I just don't realize it.  They seem quite random to me, and restarting MC and repeating the exact same action that "caused" the crash never repeats it again immediately (though maybe sometime later).

Here's another crash log from this evening, using 12.0.77...

http://www.geocities.com/ri0n/mc/M_12.0.77_Crash_Log.zip

[Alex B]

If you've experienced any video thumbnailing related problems with previous builds, please give this version a good testing.

We've moved creation of video thumbnails into their own process.  This side-steps the problems associated with the many DirectShow filters that aren't thread safe like they should be.

Thanks for any feedback.

Until now I have let MC12 build video thumbnails in small batches by browsing each video folder separately. By doing this I have almost been able to avoid crashes. MC12 still crashed occasionally, but I did not lost all already built thumbnails.

As usual, I now restored an MC11.1 library backup in MC12.0.78. I went directly to my video root and MC built all video thumbnails without crashing. Only "JRthumb.exe" reported a crash twice, but that did not crash MC12. When I browsed the videos again MC built the rest of the thumbnails. It seems that you have almost nailed the problem (at least it works for me).

MC12 still does not check the Image File field and build a thumbnail of the linked cover art file instead of the video file. (MC11.1 can do this correctly).