Forum Discussion

LPLP's avatar
LPLP
Channel Surfer
16 years ago

Box Crashes or Reboots

I developed an app based on the VideoPlayer sample application.

The box crashed/rebooted by itself after playing 4 or 5 clips and this is about 2 days ago. Today things are worse, box is crashing while playing the fist clip itself.
Not is changed from the video platform side, we have a combination of H.264, wmv and asf files.

What I have observed today is, the box crashes after 2 or 3 mins into the clip.
I've experienced the same on one occasion with Amazon videos also (2 min preview).

I am not quite sure if there is any memory leak on the application or if there is any incompatibility on the codec.

If anyone has any insight or suggestion please advise

Regards
LP
Roku Developer Program

2 Replies

  • TommyTheKid's avatar
    TommyTheKid
    Visitor
    16 years ago
    I have noticed a few crashes here too, apparently there are issues somewhere 🙂

    The one way I was able to reliably reproduce a crash was to play a video that was marked as "HD" on a "SD" TV. The first time I tried to play it, the "buffering" screen would come on and then flash back to the springboard screen. The second time I tried to play, it rebooted. I was able to reproduce this several times. I worked around the issue by creating another <media> .... </media> section with all the same information, except I changed HD -> SD. Now it plays fine on the SD TV I have setup for testing.

    I have had a couple crashes on my development Roku as well, that is plugged into an HD monitor. Usually a scripting error will just drop to the debugger, but sometimes it crashes. I have seen stuff about "leaked variables" on the debug console. I think this mostly happens when I am in the debugger in the middle of the app, and then I "make install" to try the fixed version, but have the fixed version with another bug. I cannot reliably reproduce this one.

    It would be really nice to have a syntax checker (lint?) to check the files before sending them to the Roku. I already use "xmllint" against the categor*.xml files. I have noticed the murmurings around emacs, but I am not really interested in learning a new editor at this point. I'd like to see the color coding as well, but I am more interested in a "lint" style syntax check.

    Tommy
  • LPLP's avatar
    LPLP
    Channel Surfer
    16 years ago
    Thanks for the pointers Tommy.

    Will look back to the code pertaining to DS/HD.

    Regards
    LP