Interesting crash

[Bunk_Tuppins]

The other day WMC on windows 7 began crashing every time I went into Recorded TV and moved the cursor. Terrible, bad crash, like an uncontrolled loop, which could only be stopped by nuking it with Windows Task Manager. Happened over and over. Rebooted - still happening. I have three or four thousand recorded items in 3 drives so at first I thought it might be caused by too many entries in a file directory for the program to handle or something like that. I put some files elsewhere; still crashed. Because cursor movement seemed to initiate the crash, I theorized that corrupted metadata (which WMC tries to access if the cursor hovers over a file) of one or more of the latest files might be the problem. So in windows file manager I looked at the latest few files acquired and one by one, right clicked them and chose play with WMC. Sure enough, the third or fourth file caused the crash but others did not. Once the file was deleted, the crashes in WMC Recorded TV stopped too. Whew!

[dmagerl]

That is really a coincidence. Earlier this week mine was a doing the same thing. It was a really hard crash. It turned out to be a recording of Superior Donuts. Deleted the recording and all was fine.

[Bunk_Tuppins]

That is really a coincidence. Earlier this week mine was a doing the same thing. It was a really hard crash. It turned out to be a recording of Superior Donuts. Deleted the recording and all was fine.

Yes! That was the file. Possibly they used special chars or some sort of sequence of chars that foxed WMC in the metadata or description of the file.

[dmagerl]

I wonder if it will continue happening on subsequent episodes. Time will tell.

[Bunk_Tuppins]

The episode was "What the Truck?" It's still sitting in my recycle bin. I can't see anything obviously wrong with it or the metadata shown by windows explorer.

[Space]

You can see more metadata with the program at the end of this article:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/toub/2 ... -metadata/

Look for the "EditDvrmsMetadata.zip" link, not the "download" link.

[Bunk_Tuppins]

You can see more metadata with the program at the end of this article:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/toub/2 ... -metadata/

Look for the "EditDvrmsMetadata.zip" link, not the "download" link.

Tried that just now, it's pretty slick. I am not familiar with the conventions and requirements of these records so nothing in the numerous fields pops out as problematic. Curiously, I moved the file from the recycle bin to another directory (not the directory WMC writes to) so that I could locate it in the file dialog box the program pops up. After viewing the data, when I executed the video file from there, the crash did not occur, the entry came back onto WMC Recorded TV, seemingly without incident, and I am able to view the show. This occurred after I viewed the metadata through the above linked pgm. While I was in there I saw a button for 'save metadata' which I mistakenly took for save off a text file with the contents; it actually saves any changes you type in. An error message popped up saying I had not modified any fields but it does appear to have modified the file; the properties for the file show it was modified at the time I hit the button. So it appears to have repaired it! Possibly this edit metadata pgm has internal edits that eliminated the error?

[Space]

I suppose it's possible that the metadata was corrupted in some way, but EditDvrmsMetadata was not phased by it, and when it wrote it back it wrote it correctly formatted. But I have no idea if that is what happened or not...

[Bunk_Tuppins]

Yes, unfortunately the operation, which was basically an accident, occurred on the only copy of the file so no way of verifying what really happened unless the other fellow still has a copy of the offending file in his recycle bin.

[adam1991]

Which guide data are you using?

I'm using EPG123 with Schedules Direct, and didn't have any metadata problem on that show.

[Bunk_Tuppins]

I use the default guide for OTA in my area in Northern California, just following the regular WMC setup.

[dmagerl]

Hmmm. I had pretty much the same experience. It fixed itself!

The original problem was anytime the mouse moved over the file in the recorded TV list, the screen would go black with a little white window that said, and I'm paraphrasing it, "An unrecoverable error has occurred and I'm going to reboot and there's nothing you can do about it".

Deleting the file from within Windows Explorer fixed the problem.

So I dragged the file from the trash and wondered what would happen if I converted it to dvr-ms format. I put both the original file and the new dvrms file back into the recorded TV folder and both of them played!

So either the conversion did something to the file, or more likely, just removing the file from the recorded TV folder and putting it back in fixed the issue.

[Bunk_Tuppins]

The original problem was anytime the mouse moved over the file in the recorded TV list, the screen would go black with a little white window that said, and I'm paraphrasing it, "An unrecoverable error has occurred and I'm going to reboot and there's nothing you can do about it".

Yeah, precisely the same symptoms. Hard to get out of the error too. Still a mystery but relieved to have it stop.

[dmagerl]

This keeps getting weirder and weirder. I played the file and it was of the program that aired after Superior Donuts. The time stamp said the recording began at 8:30 instead of 8:00, the scheduled broadcast time of Superior Donuts.

[Burgh229]

I had the same problem with WMC crashing due to the Superior Donuts recording. I moved it to my desktop and the problem went away. CBS switched the time slot for "Superior Donuts" with "Me, Myself and I". My recording of Me, Myself and I was actually Superior Donuts and vise versa. Since we aren't getting guide updates on a regular basis this will occur as shows get replaced. The only thing that looked weird in the metadata was the WM/MediaThumbTimeStamp. It was a negative number, -4616189618054758400, where all of my other recording have a positive number. The only special character in the file was a question mark in the WM/SubTitle, "What the Truck?".

[TheReaper]

I read this, and I have a scheduled recording of Superior Donuts. So I cursored over to the tile for Superior Donuts in WMC recorded TV. Sure enough, WMC crashed and then restarted. So I moved the Superior Donuts_WCBSDT_2017_10_30_21_30_01.wtv file to another folder watched by WMC.(an added library folder). Then I went into WMC and cursored over to the tile for Superior Donuts in WMC recorded TV, and no crash. My guess would be that meta data which gets downloaded once and then stored was corrupt (like description maybe), and moving the file caused that meta data to be re-downloaded, and the meta-data fairy fixed the data sometime after the show was recorded (possibly a customer complaint about gobbledygook in the description or something).

[Bunk_Tuppins]

I read this, and I have a scheduled recording of Superior Donuts. So I cursored over to the tile for Superior Donuts in WMC recorded TV. Sure enough, WMC crashed and then restarted. So I moved the Superior Donuts_WCBSDT_2017_10_30_21_30_01.wtv file to another folder watched by WMC.(an added library folder). Then I went into WMC and cursored over to the tile for Superior Donuts in WMC recorded TV, and no crash. My guess would be that meta data which gets downloaded once and then stored was corrupt (like description maybe), and moving the file caused that meta data to be re-downloaded, and the meta-data fairy fixed the data sometime after the show was recorded (possibly a customer complaint about gobbledygook in the description or something).

That's an interesting idea. Possibly the metadata exists in two places: the file itself (as can be seen by using the program somebody linked above while disconnected from the internet) and an internal data store in WMC which would presumably be used to register things like this has already been recorded. So there would be two sources of data - the EPG and a realtime record made by WMC. Possibly this crash is caused by a discrepancy between the timestamp on the file (which was wrong because CBS changed the schedule after WMC OTA EPG was created) and the timestamp registered by WMC internally as the recording takes place? And when you move the file to a different directory WMC no longer tries to match the timestamps?

[Bunk_Tuppins]

Come to think of it, there may be yet a third source of data in the case of OTA broadcasts. I believe a small amount of metadata is piggy-backed on the HF signal along with the video. Never been quite sure if WMC has access to it.

[notecgirl]

dmagerl - thank you. My son did what you suggested and it worked. It was Superior Donuts, also.