Problem with video playing

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We are doing the maintenance of an application that is written in C# and VB. Its interface is written in Flash 8.0.

The application is playing video files from hard drive, and in debug or release on our development machines, it works ok. But in production on client machines, the video freezes and application won't respond.

Application does not crash, nor does it throw any exception. Windows is still running since it responds to network requests. Application is made in a way that it can't be turned off on client machines so they can't do anything until video play is done, and it is never done because video freezes.

The videos are played using winmm.dll with "media" parameter passed.
It doesn't happen all the time, and sometimes it plays certain video okay, but next time when a video is played, it freezes.

Any suggestions?

Posted 20-Aug-10 5:10am

VedranTrebovic

Updated 23-Aug-10 8:01am

Deeksha Shenoy

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Christian Graus · Answer 1 · 2010-08-20T10:05:00

The software sounds very messy. I assume VB means VB.NET, so you're using .NET on the back end and flash on the front ? .NET has a media player control for playing videos, and I'm sure flash does to, so why are you playing them this way ?

In situations like this, I'd add some logging, so that you get a log written of where the app is when it freezes, although in this case, it sounds like it's freezing inside the media player's code and not your own. Do your videos use any special codecs that might be corrupted ? Does your code do anything while the videos play that could be causing this ? If you hit CTRL-SHIFT-ESC, does the task manager come up ? If you're blocking it, could you try not blocking it, to see how much memory your app is using and if it's responsive ?

VedranTrebovic · Answer 2 · 2010-08-20T23:26:00

Thanks for your answer. We appreciate it.

The application is written that way God knows why. The guy(s) who wrote it thought it is the right way.

We added some logging but it seems application just hangs, so it logs nothing. It logs only the last video played so we know aprox. when application stopped playing. I've seen event viewer and application is trying to update itself (it is logged like an error because it can't update itself due to proxy settings) so we know an application is alive, but it just hangs and video player froze the interface and user can't do any interaction with application.
Also Dr Watson didn't catch anything so it never threw any exception.
Maybe this is relevant. All client machines are running WinXP SP1 and SP2, and on our test machine with WinXP SP3 we couldn't procreate same issue.
Could it be about WinXP version or winmm.dll version?

VedranTrebovic · Answer 3 · 2010-08-23T03:58:00

Update:

We did a lot of changes in our code (changed entirely video player, database comm classes etc.) and it had no effect.
Then we updated client machines to WinXP SP3 and it had no effect.
Finally we found out that on our test machine which never froze, and which is maintained by one of our guys, has Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and client machines have Flash Player 9.x. So we changed Flash Player on clients machine to newest one and so far it is working for several hours now. Usually it would freeze after 20 minutes to 1 hour.
I've read that Flash Player 9 has few major bugs so I guess it was causing our application to hang. I would like to hear someones opinion on this if they had same issue?

Hopefully this will help us, as somebody else who has same issue.

Problem with video playing

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