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How to "Fix" MC if it is Hanging or Crashing

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glynor:
Media Center is usually a well-behaved application. Many users on Interact have it installed on a wide variety of known-stable hardware, and for most users it runs trouble-free with little needed system modification. However, MC is also a powerful application. It has a high-speed database at its core, that is custom designed to do what it does with the lowest possible latency. And, of course, it has a raft of options, some esoteric, and supports an immense amount of weirdo, high-end, often misbehaving, nerd hardware.

And, of course, it runs on a computer. Which is... Well, a computer. So it is subject to all of that regular stuff too.

So, unfortunately, sometimes everything doesn't go so smoothly.  If you are experiencing an issue such as crashing, hanging (intermittent or dead-locked), or stuttering playback, then this guide very likely contains the solution to your problems.  These are common troubleshooting steps that we'll use to help diagnose any related performance or crashing problem.  Some things could be a problem in Media Center itself, and if so, JRiver staff will try to track it down and fix it.  However, it only wastes everyone's time to hunt for bugs that turn out to be caused by something else.  I've written this guide to capture most of those kinds of general troubleshooting steps.

Before reporting a performance-related or crashing issue on Interact, please work through (at least) the First Steps in this guide to see if you are able to resolve your issue (or gather additional useful details).

Media Center Troubleshooting Guide

If you have any comments or feedback on the guide itself, please respond below.

If you are actually having an issue like this, though, please work through the first steps in the guide above, and then if needed, post about your issue in a new thread on Interact.  Replies to this thread that are requests for help with specific issues will be moved or deleted.

glynor:
Reserved and someone should sticky this (thanks, Jim).

I'm trying very hard to keep this OS-agnostic (or to comment where it isn't).  I'm not positive how SMF works, but it would be nice to have this "stickied" somehow (but to this thread, not a duplicate) over on that other board.  After I finish, and get some feedback integrated, and whatnot, I'll try (no promises) to methodically convert this into the Wiki as well.  But I thought the best way to get it written and get feedback, would be to have it here, not there.

A few things I haven't addressed, but plan to are:

1. Malware removal (basics only).
2. Basic hardware validation (memtest86+, Prime95, and 3DMark or something similar).
3. Many MC-specific little tweaks and gotchas, like the one suggested by kstuart here.

A couple other housekeeping things I should mention, though...  If you have good suggestions for additions, please speak up!  I'll monitor the thread and add things that are valuable (probably via a short blurb and link to your post).  If you can, do your best to write them up methodically and well, so that I can link to it and it is useful for regular users.

Along those lines, though... My goal with this is not for it to be a "MC Tweaking Guide".  I'm trying to focus on problem solving, and common things we all encounter here over and over.  If something happens and a weird esoteric thing fixes it that you've never heard of or thought about before, well, that's probably not worth adding (here, certainly post your own Thread about it, in case it does happen more than once).

This is for the big, common cases.  Hopefully, it helps us stop having to post the same things over and over and over (with varying degrees of quality and friendliness of explanation).

Likewise, if you find links to good "definitive threads" where someone explained any of these steps (especially those that I gloss over above) in great detail, give me the links and a suggestion of where I should link/insert it above.  I'd like to have many more links to these kinds of things, but I'm busy writing, not searching for exemplar threads.

I'm not done.

InflatableMouse:
Thanks! Looks good.

I'm looking into adding a link to the wiki::stability page to this :P. I guess I could do several things. The current wiki page has an overlap with this; I could remove the steps and link to this thread or simply add this thread as a bullet to the list of steps. Or, completely replace the page and copy this over (which would require maintenance whenever this changes). How does this look? (2nd alinea) Suggestions?

I noticed that nowhere you suggest to enable logging in MC. I think one of the first steps in case of MC crashing (as in, exiting) is to enable logging and uploading/sending the log somewhere.

6233638:
Great work!
 

--- Quote from: glynor on January 15, 2014, 12:47:09 am ---1. Go to: Options > Startup > Update Channels and change it to Latest.
--- End quote ---
I feel like making auto-update automatically grab the "latest" build whenever an update is manually initiated (because you normally only do that when troubleshooting) would avoid a lot of support-related posts on the forum. ("I have the latest version", "how do I change channels", "I only want stable builds" etc.)

Arindelle:
Excellent ! Looks like a "sticky" to me in progress

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