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[eapool]

Last night, we had a brief power outage and when everything came back up, I could not watch any video (live tv, recorded tv, or movies).  MC would crash immediately after playing the video.  I tried RO and ROHQ.  When I tried HQ, I had the option to send an bug report to MADVR, so I did.  I finally tried to play an audio file and I received an error regarding my audio setup not being compatible.  I looked in my audio setup and it was set for 4 channels, instead of 5.1.  I switched it back to 5.1 and everything played properly. The computer is on UPS, but the audio receiver isn't. I am not sure how audio settings got changed, but I imagine it has to do with the receiver losing power and not the computer. Since then I have received an email from madshi indicating that "This looks like a crash in the MediaCenter's AC3 encoder which madVR just detected and reported. Might make sense to report this to the JRiver guys.".  

I also have logs of the crash, if necessary.  I am back up and running, but I thought I would let you all know.

Alex

[JimH]

That sounds like a power surge caused some damage.

[eapool]

That sounds like a power surge caused some damage.

Yea, that isn't what happened.  I got everything working without changing any 'damaged' equipment.  I have a log that says JRiver crashed.  I was able to fix the problem by resetting my sound settings.  I thought you guys might like to know that when the sounds settings are not correct for the associated hardware and the user is attempting to watch video, MC does not give an error, it crashes.  It did give me the error message when playing audio and I was able to determine what was wrong and fix it.

Alex

[JimH]

No need to send a log.

[mwillems]

I've actually gotten similar crashes in JRiver occasionally related to the sound device losing power when the PC did not.  It's not 100% reproducible for me, but I've seen it multiple times with a similar fact pattern.  I have a DAC that is my main output from my HTPC.  If the computer is asleep and the DAC loses power, if the computer wakes up from sleep before the DAC comes back on, attempting to start playback will sometimes crash JRiver (even when the DAC has been turned on).  That sounds somewhat similar to what happened with your receiver.

I used to have an unusual configuration which created this issue frequently, which is how I figured it out.  I have my HTPC on a UPS, but my TV, amps and DAC are all on a switch that lets me turn them off when I'm not using them.  So at night I usually turn off the TV, amps and DAC, but let the PC go to sleep without turning it off. So the next day, I'd go and shake the mouse to wake up the computer, but forget that everything else was still off.  So I'd go and flip the power switch for the tv/dac/amps, etc. and when I did that exact sequence, about one time in four JRiver would crash when I tried to start playback.  I never got a crash if I remembered to power up the DAC before waking the PC.

So the repro steps (sort of) are:

1) Allow PC to go to sleep
2) Cut power to DAC
3) Wake PC up
4) Restore power to DAC
5) Try playback.

It was a weird/flaky enough problem that I just took the DAC off of the switch and put it on the UPS with the computer, it doesn't use that much power anyway.