Occasional crash

[bluejaywpg]

I have the registered GPhotoShow Pro edition & it occasionally crashes on its own (anywhere from once a week to once a day - could be anytime including the middle of the night for example when the computer is running & no one is using it at all). It will say that GPhotoShow has stopped working... on a black background & I have to use ALT-TAB to easily close it. This happened with 5.2.1 installed on my old installation of Windows 7 & still happens on my new installation of Windows 7 (Home Premium) which has 5.2.2. Not sure if this is due to a few bad picture files or what. Is there any way of telling what picture was last displayed or about to be displayed in a log or something? Or could it be a bug? Here are some of my settings:

Dual monitors (1 is 1920x1080, the other 1360x768)
Screensaver runs displaying pictures & videos on both screens showing separate images or videos
Screensaver plays MP3 files - my collection also contains a couple or so non-MP3 files (WMA, WAV, etc.)
My collection contains over 90,000 pics & videos, over 1,000 MP3s
Videos are played using the latest version of VLC (1.1.11?) & I have .MOV, .AVI, & .MP4. Might have the odd other like WMA.
I have enabled many features such as changing some keystrokes, displaying text regarding the picture, music, & time, & made many changes over the time I've jad this screensaver

Any ideas as to what could be wrong? Do you need more info?

[bluejaywpg]

Sure enough, it happened to crash a few minutes after posting the above post, but I was not near or watching the screensaver when it happened. Here's some more info:

The exact error message is: gPhotoShow Pro Slide Show Maker has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

On this instance, it was displaying pictures (not blank screens, videos, or panoramas) on both monitors at the point of crashing. Could not see anything unusual about the properties of the pictures - both appeared to be unedited pictures from our most-used cameras at the times the pics were taken.

So I don't think it's the files unless it's related to the next file(s) that would've been displayed. But there would have to be a way of checking the next file to be loaded. My screensaver is set to choose files randomly.

[gpb]

For gPhotoShow Pro the most common cause of program crash is video playing, the second common cause is a photo with corrupted exif headers. There are some things you can do identify what is causing the crash:
1) Enable error logging in the About section of gPhotoShow Pro. After the crash open the log file and see which was the last file loaded by the program. Anyway understanding the log file could be rather hard so please send it to me with a PM or by email
2) Disable audio and video files for some time. This can be useful to see if the issue is related to audio or video files

[bluejaywpg]

OK I've done the above & will send the log file upon next crash(es). Lately it seems to last just a few hours before it crashes.

Is it not possible to program the screensaver to ignore corrupt or "un-understandable" exif headers?

And can gPhotoShow crash playing a video, even if it's set to play all videos via VLC? (I'm assuming they are set properly to play via VLC anyway...)

[gpb]

Is it not possible to program the screensaver to ignore corrupt or "un-understandable" exif headers?

And can gPhotoShow crash playing a video, even if it's set to play all videos via VLC? (I'm assuming they are set properly to play via VLC anyway...)

gPhotoShow already check exif headers before using them, this was implemented a couple of years ago and since then we didn't receive any report about crash caused by exif headers or corrupted jpegs but since data corruption can be unpredictable a crash could always happen
About video things are a little more complicated since the code to play video is inside VLC (or media player) and sometimes interaction between program is not perfect and a crash could happen more often.

[bluejaywpg]

Well so far no crashes at all when running just pictures or just pictures & music. As soon as I re-enabled videos, the screensaver crashed in less than an hour. Since I work as a computer tech, I peeked at the log file. I assume you mean the one created in users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\GPhotoShow Pro. I saw the last video near the end of the log file an MP4 file) & attempted to manually play it back. Turns out WMP & VLC are unable to play it & Windows cannot create a thumbnail of it, so I guess it's corrupt. Anyway I renamed the file's extension so the screensaver should ignore it going forward.

Will check this log file every time it crashes to see if it's due to more corrupted videos.

So now the question - is there a way to have the screensaver not crash when a bad video is attempted to be played via VLC? And even better would be to have the log record this sort of event, or record a separate error log perhaps? Even better if the screensaver supports all common video types (a tall order I know) so that you can have more control over how the screensaver reacts to situations like this.

[gpb]

Well so far no crashes at all when running just pictures or just pictures & music. As soon as I re-enabled videos, the screensaver crashed in less than an hour. Since I work as a computer tech, I peeked at the log file. I assume you mean the one created in users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\GPhotoShow Pro. I saw the last video near the end of the log file an MP4 file) & attempted to manually play it back. Turns out WMP & VLC are unable to play it & Windows cannot create a thumbnail of it, so I guess it's corrupt. Anyway I renamed the file's extension so the screensaver should ignore it going forward.

Ok. Thanks for letting me know.

So now the question - is there a way to have the screensaver not crash when a bad video is attempted to be played via VLC? And even better would be to have the log record this sort of event, or record a separate error log perhaps? Even better if the screensaver supports all common video types (a tall order I know) so that you can have more control over how the screensaver reacts to situations like this.

gPhotoShow already does what it is possible to prevent crashes but since videos are played by external components it is not always possible to recover from a crash. Implementing video playing natively in gPhotoShow is an option of course but it would require a lot of programming work. The real nightmare in playing video is the wide range of different formats, windows offers some support for avi files but all other formats should be implemented almost from zero. As you can imagine this is far from the original scope of gPhotoShow.

[bluejaywpg]

Well I had 2 more crashes & each time I checked the log file & found the last video was corrupt again so I renamed the extensions again.

At least there's 1 bright side to the crashes - I'm finding out what videos are no good! I'll have to see if there's some utility out there that can try to fix corrupted video files (if that's possible).

[bluejaywpg]

Well I had another crash & I was going to not only send the log file to you (it did not seem to crash due to a corrupt video file this time) & also ask another question - but I see version 6 is out. I'll get 6 for now & see what happens 1st. If you want the 5.2.2 file anyway, I can still send.

My other question was going to be about why GPhotoShow sometimes disables & then when you re-enable it, it disables within a couple seconds or so. I'll test 6 first to see if it still does the same thing or not.

[gpb]

Well I had another crash & I was going to not only send the log file to you (it did not seem to crash due to a corrupt video file this time) & also ask another question - but I see version 6 is out. I'll get 6 for now & see what happens 1st. If you want the 5.2.2 file anyway, I can still send.

Please try version 6, some bugs have been fixed and interface with VLC is a little more robust, it should be able to ignore VLC crashes but I don't know how much stable gPhotShow is after a VLC crash.

My other question was going to be about why GPhotoShow sometimes disables & then when you re-enable it, it disables within a couple seconds or so. I'll test 6 first to see if it still does the same thing or not.

gPhotoShow as every screen saver never starts by itself nor it can disable/enable itself. All screen saver handling is performed by windows. Starting from Vista windows automatically disables screen saver for some time if the user interrupts a screen saver within few seconds from startup. Also some programs like windows media player disable screen saver while they are running.