Media_play crash

Hi,

I've experienced crash when using media_play - the engine suddenly quits without any error message or entry in acklog.txt when executing the instruction.

I've been able to reproduce it even with a new empty level with no other script at all.
What the script does is basically this:

1) select random .wma file
2) media_play it
3) after random 1 - 4s sleep terminate it
4) start over

Now the crash happens (tested numerous times) after playing of (by repeating the loop) 140-160 files. I've checked task manager and there seems to be no memory leak - the memory is allocated and freed just fine.

It seems to, however, happen only on certain PCs. I have been unable to find the difference that could cause this. The PCs with this problem had both WinXP and Win 2000 installed, 512 MB RAM, AMD processor and C-Media internal audio (but there are some PC that had not this problem while having the same C-Media audio).

Can you please try that on some of you test configurations? If needed, I can send the small testing project along with DXdiag info from some of the affected PCs.

thank you.

Yes, I can test it if you send me that project. If it only happens on a certain PC, it's probably a CODEC bug, maybe in combination with that particular WMA file. However I must tell you in advance that even if we can reproduce the bug, we most likely won't be able to do anything about it.

Thank you for your reply, I've sent you the mail. I was able to produce it even when playing a single empty .wma file over and over again.

EDITED:

I'm sorry, there's a bug in the script I sent you.
string strTemp[10];
should be
string strTemp[20];
otherwise the sound isn't found and played. I apologize and send corrected version.

also:

The sound file doesn't have to play for long, so the sleep() part can be replaced with wait(1). And what's most strange - after I set the script to play only one file, the crash happens always at the same place (after being played 125 times - with this file).

Thanks, I've got it and will try to reproduce the problem on some of our test systems in the next days.

We've run a test on several systems and could not observe a problem. So I suppose it's indeed related to a Codec on that particular system.

JCL,

This same crash was happening to me awhile back until I disabled my ZipDrive driver. The driver was apparently polling the printer port once each second causing the engine to stop momentarily. It was annoying but occasionally it would crash.

This is interesting. Polling the parallel port certainly won't do harm to the engine, but maybe the zip driver does some other ugly things that cause a crash. It would be great if you could find out the driver version.

Hi, I'm sorry that I don't have time now to react more throroughly or do some tests - maybe later this week - but just to let you know : one of the affected PCs I wrote about indeed has IOmega zip drive installed, the other doesn't but did in the past so there may still be some drivers active. This really sounds like a very probable cause...