WMC & MB3 crashes after ff/rw

[punterbo 0]

Server: 3.0.5387.37160

MBC: 3.0.207.0

 

When I hit the fast forward/rewind button, WMC sometimes crashes out completely. It's intermittent - sometimes I can hit it a few times in an episode before it crashes, sometimes it doesn't happen at all. 

 

Regards, Stuart

[techywarrior 688]

ebr, I think this is related to the thread someone made about it crashing after playback.

 

I noticed last night that it would crash if I tried to switch videos while the first was still playing. If I pressed "stop" first then it never seemed to crash. Next time it happens I'll try and get a windows log. (I have MBC 214)

[ebr 14912]

FF and Rew don't actually do anything unless you also press numbers before them or you are playing a DVD rip.  What format of file are you playing and exactly what are you doing?

 

Windows event log from the crash?

[punterbo 0]

Yeah I'm not sure why I said ff/rewind, I actually mean skip forward/skip backward, which I have set to 200s/30s respectively. 

 

There's no log for Windows Media Center at that time, just an application crash log. I've attached it, but it's not very interesting.

 

Let me know what else you need.

 

 

e1.txt

[ebr 14912]

Yeah Media Center itself is crashing when we attempt to seek (I'm assuming since I haven't seen the MBC log).  Could be a problem in WMC, or codecs or even video drivers maybe.  Try setting your skip forward amount a little smaller and see if that makes a difference.

[michaeltruncale 5]

Was there other discoveries in this issue? Same thing happens to me when skip forward / skip back with Emby Plugin for WMC. I can skip forward / skip back fine with recorded video when in WMC.

[Deihmos 147]

There is no ff/rw in wmc with unsupported videos like mkv. One of the reasons why I moved away from it.

[softworkz 3335]

I had the same problem. It occured quite often and always crashed WMC.

 

The solution was to disable the "Enhanced Player Interface". Since I changed that no more crashes occured (yes, on the same video files).

So it must be related to the new player interface.

 

softworkz

[softworkz 3335]

I got some further experience on this issue:

 

• After disabling the "Enhanced Player", I never experienced any crash on skip forward or back - as I reported previously here
   
• But: I'm still experiencing some very similar crash situations sometimes when stopping playback of mkv videos (either caused by manual stop command or by play command for different file which would also stop the current playback)

While I don't have a useful explanation at this time, there are two things I would like to ask all those people experiencing/suffering from this problem:

• Did you install the "Media Control" plugin for WMC?
• Did you install any codec pack (which one, version)?

The idea behind is this: Feedback on this thread was quite limited, so it can't be a general problem but rather an issue that occurs with certain configurations, only.

Please share your experiences, to help us find and fix the actual cause!!

 

Thanks,

 

softworkz

[Deihmos 147]

I doubt you will find anyone that still use WMC and don't experience a crash occasionally. One reason I had to stop using it with emby.

Edited October 26, 2015 by Deihmos

[softworkz 3335]

I can't believe that. If these crashes would occur on many installations it would be easy to reproduce and thus identify the actual cause for the crashes..

[ebr 14912]

Do I infer correctly from your above post that you are using Media Control?

 

If so, have you checked the option in the EMC config pages to disable functions that conflict with that program?

[softworkz 3335]

Sure, I always had this.

 

 

When I used the custom player interface, ehshell often crashed when skipping back or forward, or starting playback of an .mkv file.

Since I disabled the custom player interface, skipping works fine, but there are still  sometimes crashes when starting playback of a new mkv video while another mkv is still running.

 

Interestingly, after a fresh start of WMC it never crashed instantly. It always crashed after at least two or three mkv videos have been played.

[ebr 14912]

Some sort of conflict or interaction with Media Control would explain why this doesn't happen to most people.

[softworkz 3335]

I think I probably solved it now!

 

One thing I had always noted when viewing processes in a crash situation was as significant number of ehexthost.exe subprocesses of ehshell.exe.

Today I investigated these processes and found that two of them were related to WMC extensions I had installed long time ago and simply forgotten about their existance. These two were:

• Mikinho Mount Image and
• Audio Renderer Updater

(addtionally I also removed the mcShoutcast add-in to get a minimal configuration)

 

After removing these extensions and restarting, I wasn't able to make WMC crash again, not even with intensive start, stop, skip, ff or rewind operations.

Same with the custom player interace: No more crashes so far.

 

This is an instant assessment, though. It might still be possible that crashes occur after some time has passed, but I'm quite confident that the crashes were caused by one of the removed extensions.

 

So here is my suggestion for anybody who is experiencing WMC crashes as well:

• In case of a crash use some kind of advanced task manager like "Process Explorer" from Sysinternals
• Investigate all ehexthost.exe processes by looking at the list of loaded modules (dlls) to find out which WMC extension each process is hosting
• Uninstall/remove all extensions except Emby and MediaControl (if you are using that)
• Restart and check if you are still getting crashes
  (now there should be just two ehexthost.exe processes - Emby and MediaControl)

If that procedure helped you to get rid of the crashes, you can start reinstalling the removed extensions one by one, always checking that you are not getting crashes again

Edited October 27, 2015 by softworkz