Software that breaks itself

T

tongue_of_colicab

Veteran
Tonight me and my family wanted to watch a dvd from my brother that I ripped some time ago to my htpc (we dont have a dvd player in the living room and my htpc doesnt have one either). I already checked a few days ago if it worked and everything worked just fine using powerdvd. But tonight powerdvd on itself decided that it didnt want to work anymore and just broke down never to work again showing that useless we encounterd a error thing want to send it to MS blabla.

I honestly cant get my head around this. How, for the love of god can a piece of software decide to just die on its own? I didnt change anything, I didnt even use the system since I used it to check the movie a few days back. Even rebooting or reinstalling doesnt help. It just decided it didnt want to be dvd playing software anymore and said screw you. Or so it seems.

I had to put up with the dozens of haha you idiot remarks of my dad (not really the funny kind of ones) which pisses me off even more because litrally every time I use the damn thing either the hardware decides to not work, windows takes a day of or like now powerdvd just gets a life of its own and if you try the next day it will work without a hitch... it just isnt possible.

Someone should build a piece of software that makes it possible to hurt a other piece of software... poke its virtual eyes out or something, letting it know who's the boss.

Did you ever had software deciding for itself what it wanted to do?
 
Yes, yes yes yes. My HTPC seems to enjoy frequently ass-raping itself. I'll fire up a video, skip through it a bit while I adjust the volume, bass, treble and whatnot, then restart while I grab a bite to eat. When I get back, I fire up the video...and what happens? A BSOD. Or it complains that it can't play the Audio stream, or it produces interlacing.

The system is in utterly perfect condition, everything is brand new, there are no problems with the hardware (testing proves that)... It just randomly decides to make my nicely planned out night a living hell. Quite ironically though, when everything else fails to work, it seems PowerDVD is the one media playing application I can turn to that WONT fudge the system over. Go figure...
 
Something is wrong...
Applications don't normally behave like that. . .just because it is a HTPC it does not mean it is more likely to break.

My HTPC almost never ever breaks.. and the time it did BSOD was when I installed a crappy Linksys USB Wireless G adapter and it didn't like the Linksys wireless configuration utility.

Either you guys have a software problem, maybe codecs or something or... you have some marginal hardware fault.

Try stressing your system out a bit.. run Prime95 with 3DMark 2001 SE looping 30 times or something... go on you know you want to.
 
Heh, this thing is memtested and Primed, but no 3dmark since it's running an MX4000 (ie; '3d, what's that?'). I'm quite sure there's no fault with the hardware, and the Windows install is brand new and squeeky clean.

Software just sucks, that's all.
 
Sobek said:
Heh, this thing is memtested and Primed, but no 3dmark since it's running an MX4000 (ie; '3d, what's that?'). I'm quite sure there's no fault with the hardware, and the Windows install is brand new and squeeky clean.

Software just sucks, that's all.
Click to expand...

Try switching RAM modules or the PSU and see what happens with PowerDVD then.
Software can't be blamed for everything, you know ? ;)
 
My HTPC has developed a "cooling issue" I have to watch a movie with an icepack placed on top otherwise is BSOD's after an hour or so..
 
Anything but media player classic sucks for movie playback. It doesn't try to get updated all the time either. And it doesn't care about Windows updates either.
 
Sounds like codec problems.

Try watching the movie in VLC (free media player), that doesn't rely on Windows installed codecs. If that works, there's a good chance something else was installed that messed up PowerDVD.
 
I watched the movie friday using vlc (couple of days back I had a old version that didnt want to play the movie) and it worked fine. But I really didnt change anything to the system before so I still dont understand why powerdvd doesnt want to work anymore.
 
Codec issue most certainly then. VLC doesn't use the installed codecs, which means it hardly ever runs into issues playing a file but sometimes its performance (skipping, artifacts) can be a little on the bad side. Great to use in a pinch, or if you simply don't want to mess with all the stupid codecs out there (like me).
 
How can it be a codec problem? it worked fine, I changed nothing, than it stopped working. Not to mention powerdvd didnt gave a codec error but the whole program itself just seems broken because it has the send your error report to ms message.
 
just a thought did powerdvd come pre-installed ?
if so it could be a limited trial

something similar happened to me with my free copy of nero the ability to convert avi's into dvd format has now been disabled
the rest of it works fine
 
It does still sound like a codec problem, to me. I had similar problems with PowerDVD when the demuxer (or something) got switched to one PowerDVD wasn't 'comfortable' with.

There are applications which can change which codecs take priority over others, but you have to be careful with those. I also can't remember the name of those programs, but I'm sure some searches could bring stuff up.

Did you install ANYTHING on your computer between when PowerDVD was installed and when it stopped working? Windows updates? Other software updates?

Either way, I can't stand dealing with codec issues, VLC has me mostly covered, I only install the few codecs that it doesn't support / don't support correctly.
 
tongue_of_colicab said:
Did you ever had software deciding for itself what it wanted to do?
Click to expand...

Always, except when I'm running it in a debugger and force the execution to certain state. :D That's what a program is supposed to do - it does what it does, not what _you_ think it does...

Time to light up the flamethrower: WTF people, you are building HTPCs on Windows and generic PC hardware and expect stability? What is wrong with you?
 
I agree: nothing beats Linux for custom solutions. And then most any hardware will do, as long as it has the needed connectors.
 
Give LinuxMCE a try.


It does indeed sound like a codec issue. Codecs in windows have always been handled suckily (dunno if that is so in vista still).
 
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