Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   paschalleddie1
   Member

   I have Vista Home Premium 32 Bit. The program crashes immediately when I try to add a file. I installed it on an XP partition and it works fine. Anyone able to get it to work on a Vista machine?

   Thanks

   Posted 11 years ago #
2. 

   archer_310
   Member

   I am also having this problem using XP. Also wondering what's wrong.

   Posted 11 years ago #
3. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   You've probably got something incompatible installed. FOr the most part self-contained, I've run the WinX stuff on all sorts of hardware & Windows versions.

   When any app crashes there's usually a conflict of some sort where the code can't do what it's supposed to, & so the app closes or stalls or goes into a loop etc. Because of the way Windows handles video it can be pretty hard to figure out where the problem lies when the app that's crashing is video-related like the WinX converter.

   The easiest thing you can try -- after a backup -- is make sure nothing video-related is running [using task mgr. etc.], then rename the files &/or folders for any codecs & DS {Direct Show] filters you've installed, figuring out which one(s) cause the problem. In win7 you can also try the Codec Tweak Tool & the Win7 DS Filter Tweaker, both free at videohelp.com. Apps like Nirsoft's free Installed Codec can make it easier to find all the DS filters that are installed. A harder but more accurate way of finding out what's going on is to use the free Sysinternals Process Monitor that you can download from microsoft.com -- it'll log what seems like everything going on behind the scenes with Windows, & then you save & parse that log, going through all the entries to find out what happened just before the WinX app crashed. Graphedit, or one of the few replacements that are available might help -- render a media file [from the File menu], & you'll see directly what filters Windows wants to use, & if they're working; you can also substitute other filters manually to figure out what does work. The best preventative measure is to be *EXTREMELY* picky about what audio & video related stuff you install in the 1st place, e.g. installing any sort of codec pack is begging for trouble.

   Background...
   When you open a video file Windows video apps very often try to assemble a chain of filters -- separate files with one or more discreet functions, e.g. splitting the audio & video tracks into separate streams. It decides what filters to try based on the jobs those filters report they can do, which BTW is often inaccurate. Each of these filters also has something called a merit ranking, where a higher ranked filter will be tried before a lesser one -- there are tools to set the merit that can be useful. If "building the graph" the 1st chain doesn't obviously work, another filter will be tried & a 2nd chain attempted, & if that doesn't obviously work, a 3rd & so on. I use the word obviously because a given chain might *seem* to work as far as Windows software is concerned, but the results might still be very broken. Bear in mind that once a filter is tried & discarded, that does not necessarily mean that filter file is unloaded & closed -- it's quite possible that an incompatible filter will be tried & discarded, yet hang around to cause whatever app to misbehave... worse, since it isn't being actively used, you have to use something like Process Explorer [also from SysInternals] to find that out. Worse yet, the version numbers of not just the filter files, but any supporting files used may be critical, & graphics hardware & drivers also come into play -- for the last several years most all graphics cards/chips have included hardware video acceleration, because playing full screen video takes more horsepower than weaker CPUs can provide. Separate & predating stuff like the CUDA you see bandied about, driver versions can make a difference, as can turning off video acceleration -- I've seen it work for example to turn off video acceleration in PowerDVD, even though that's not where I was having the problem.

   Posted 11 years ago #
4. 

   ChrisS
   Administrator

   I agree with mikiem2 that you've got a compatibility issue. However, I'd use the built-in error reporting system (Event Viewer) to see if the cause of the failure has already been identified.

   Posted 11 years ago #
5. 

   paschalleddie1
   Member

   Dear mikiem2,

   Thank you very much for a very informative and helpful reply.

   paschalleddie1

   ps, Thanks also to ChrisS

   Posted 11 years ago #

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