Music playlist broken (5 Viewers)

[roccon]

same issue now on two client PCs. both as an upgrade and a clean install. one on xp and one on win7. have gone back to 1.30 and all is well.

 

[luckless.sucker]

@roccon: I updated my system specs. Maybe you could compare them with yours, esp. regarding audio filters etc.
Maybe you can find some similarities?

 

[roccon]

Intel hardware, E8400/E5200/ both ATI and nvidia, xp and win 7.
99.99999% sure it's simply a bug

 

[jehe]

HomeY, I did as you suggestet. I must admit that I wasn't really aware of this options in the watchdog. Most of the time I found the watchdog pretty annoying, so I disabled it (must have been with the early MP 1 versions) and since I never experienced any mentionable MP crashes since MP 1.2.3, I never really had it running again...

So... back to topic

Even without the plugins, I can reproduce this behaviour, I have the Watchdog-generated zip file attached. I hope this will help.

Are you sure that your plugins are disabeld, in your logs is the mini display plugin still visible.
This has even created an error.

 

[luckless.sucker]

@roccon: I would primarily look for similiarities in the software setup, especially selected decoders etc.

@jehe: I chose the first watchdog option, so I'm as sure as I can be.
But if I remember correctly, the MiniDisplay plugin is shipped with MP

 

[HomeY]

Disable the Winamp visualisation and test again please.

The error that @jehe is talking about is a missing .dll which probably shouldn't affect this. The more important question here would be WHY that .dll is missing from your install...

If disabling visualisation doesn't help, i'd suggest to run the MediaPortal installer again and let it do a 'fresh install', since i have no clue if you're missing more files, and it still seems nobody is able to reproduce this.

 

[luckless.sucker]

O.k... here's the result:
Having visualization completely disabled, the music playback works fine. If I enable either Milkdrop or the default WMP visualization Alchemy(?) the music playback skips every but the first file of a playlist. But as a matter of fact, I fail to see the connection between a visualization and the music playback skipping all files but the first.

I tried changing the playback engine from BASS to WASAPI, but couldn't play any music file since the WASAPI device couldn't be initialized (propably because of the RDP session I used to test that, the engine tried to initialize the remote audio driver).

Concerning the missing dll:
I don't have any idea since when this error occurs, but since the LCD Display works fine, it doesn't really matter to me. I don't know if this error existed previous to my update or not.

Here's another thing concerning the deployment:
Initially I didn't really have any plans to run an update already. But as things turn out, I didn't really have much of a choice.
I ran MP 1.3 beta fine on my HTPC and was "totaly" happy with it. Then I installed an update from within MP provided by titan (titan rocks!) which had the ugly side effect of messing up with the TV Service (I could only watch TV once and then had to reboot before turning TV on again, because the TV Service always told me that there was no free card available. Additionaly, the TV Service couldn't be terminated as normal service operation, I always had to kill the task process itself).
So I thought to myself that it might propably be a good idea to install the latest MP version, MP 1.4.
But what happened during the update? As experienced before, the installation program wasn't able to terminate the tv service which made the installer stuck. When I finally terminated the tv service manually, the installer reported an error, but marked the new version of the tv service as installed.
As one might suspect, the new MP installation didn't work correctly when it came to watching TV.
Since I wasn't able to fix the tv service manually, I finally had to select a new installation in the MP installer and everything worked fine in the resulting installation.

At this point, my scrum master would certainly say that our deployment tool would need a validation mechanism for the finished installation
Maybe you could take this as a suggestion for future versions?

btw: Concerning all the effort I've gone through to get the Milkdrop plugin running in MP, I would really enjoy being able to activate the visualization again. So, any ideas?

 

[HomeY]

O.k... here's the result:
Having visualization completely disabled, the music playback works fine. If I enable either Milkdrop or the default WMP visualization Alchemy(?) the music playback skips every but the first file of a playlist. But as a matter of fact, I fail to see the connection between a visualization and the music playback skipping all files but the first.

TNX for the report, now we're getting close
I just enabled visualisation (WMP Alchemy) and on the first attempt it seemed to 'hang' after the first song. Then i hit STOP, started playback of the 2nd song and then the fun begin It played for 4 seconds and skipped to the next song. That played for 4 seconds, and it skipped again, and so on till i hit STOP again. But... that was only on the first attempt, the few attempts after that didn't fail and music played fine, so need to look into this further.
Might only be related to Milkdrop...

I tried changing the playback engine from BASS to WASAPI, but couldn't play any music file since the WASAPI device couldn't be initialized (propably because of the RDP session I used to test that, the engine tried to initialize the remote audio driver).

Concerning the missing dll:
I don't have any idea since when this error occurs, but since the LCD Display works fine, it doesn't really matter to me. I don't know if this error existed previous to my update or not.

It throws the error during startup, since it checks for missing .dlls at that point. Did you check if the .dll is actually present in the folder?

Here's another thing concerning the deployment:
.....
But what happened during the update? As experienced before, the installation program wasn't able to terminate the tv service which made the installer stuck. When I finally terminated the tv service manually, the installer reported an error, but marked the new version of the tv service as installed.
As one might suspect, the new MP installation didn't work correctly when it came to watching TV.
Since I wasn't able to fix the tv service manually, I finally had to select a new installation in the MP installer and everything worked fine in the resulting installation.

At this point, my scrum master would certainly say that our deployment tool would need a validation mechanism for the finished installation
Maybe you could take this as a suggestion for future versions?

That sounds like a good idea, since this issue only seems to happen on specific systems. But that's also the reason for the warning:

btw: Concerning all the effort I've gone through to get the Milkdrop plugin running in MP, I would really enjoy being able to activate the visualization again. So, any ideas?

If we can reproduce the problem, we can (try to) fix it

 

[HomeY]

OK, did some more testing:

1. Enabled Alchemy (WMP) visualization
2. Checked 'Show visualization'on Now playing tab of Music section
3. Start MP, play music and go to NowPlaying
4. Visualization is showing on the CD cover (shouldn't this be fullscreen?) but playlist is still running fine and plays all files in it.

Then installed Winamp for the Milkdrop visualization:

And with Milkdrop enabled the playlist is also running fine....

 

[luckless.sucker]

I just enabled visualisation (WMP Alchemy) and on the first attempt it seemed to 'hang' after the first song. Then i hit STOP, started playback of the 2nd song and then the fun begin It played for 4 seconds and skipped to the next song. That played for 4 seconds, and it skipped again, and so on till i hit STOP again. But... that was only on the first attempt, the few attempts after that didn't fail and music played fine, so need to look into this further.
Might only be related to Milkdrop...

Hmmm.... I discovered the behaviour using Alchemy as well as Milkdrop. And you just mentioned yourself that you had some odd behaviour using Alchemy?
So I doubt that it is related to Milkdrop alone.

If we can reproduce the problem, we can (try to) fix it

Since I'm into software developement myself, I know that reproducing a bug is the alpha and omega of fixing it.
Has anyone here some experience with remote debugging in VS2012? Then I could try to debug the running application for myself. In this case, I would need your help since I've got no idea where to start looking...

...
I must admit that I didn't read any update notes before installing the new version... (shame on me, perhaps I will in the future...)