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Bug Businesses Operating Systems Software Windows Apple

QuickTime .MOV + Toshiba + Vista = BSOD 392

Question Guy writes "Apple QuickTime is involved in a troubling problem that doesn't seem to be addressed by any of the major software and hardware manufacturers involved. On Toshiba machines, such as the Protege Tablet M400s, with Windows Vista installed, opening a locally stored QuickTime .MOV causes instant bluescreen. All other video functions seem to be working in other video playback types — even streaming .MOVs work — and there is little to no 'buzz' on the Net that might push any of the parties to investigate or to play nice together (Microsoft for Vista, Intel for the GMA945 chipset, Toshiba for their custom tablet software, Apple for QuickTime). Help, anyone?"
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QuickTime .MOV + Toshiba + Vista = BSOD

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  • In your question you stated that the Toshiba laptop runs custom tablet software. If all other configurations of Vista, the Intel Chipset, Quicktime, and other variables work fine, you have just eliminated them as possibilities but the Tablet software. More than likely there is some call within the tablet software doing with the display that interacts when a Mov. is trying to be played locally, which causes conflict. Also, why is this Slashdot worthy?
  • by gsfprez ( 27403 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @06:23PM (#18834889)
    I installed Vista on my MacPro - in 12 minutes, i had a successfully BSOD'd Vista by playing a standard DiVX 6.0 file on Vista. (yesssss... i installed the drivers for everything)

    I think (i do not know - so back off, i'm guessing) that there is some kind of problem with Vista and video... at least, i'm seeing a trend.

    Considering the amount of work Microsoft put into preventing people from playing (assumedly pirated) video, I don't think its much of a strech to believe that its much harder for developers to make video playback software. I know that i read a very long article that talked about video card compliance and every 30ms being polled by the OS or some such bullshit, but i don't recall the link. But it was quite long, very extensive, and seemed to me that Vista's goal was not to provide a system which would foster video content creation - but rather, just the opposite.

    its rather sad, actually. Microsoft/Adobe and MS/AVID had the makings of at least pitiful competition for Apple/Apple & Apple/Avid... (Apple/Adobe? Yeah, not so much any more after NAB). I actually LIKE competition, because it means that Apple and their developers actually have to work to make better products.

    With all of the pain that's obivously involved with working HD video (which inclueds VIEWING IT) on Vista, there won't be much competition. If Vista is a shitty at video work as its looking to be, i suspect that Apple will be able to kick back on the beach with a mai-tai and not have to evern try... i mean, HD playback is 100% zero effort (assuming you aren't trying to do it on a PowerBook 520c) in Mac OS X - there's no DRM invovled whatsoever (except for BR and HDDVDs).... and the video cards Just Work(TM), and Quicktime just works, and VLC just works and DIVX just works.... etc.

    sucks to have your workflow based upon a product that is EOL in 7 months (Windows XP + ___________). Personally, i don't care. I've long stopped caring about the abuse people that use Windows for video work put themselves thru... sure, Windows did some things faster back in the day, but all of that is totally gone now, isn't it?

    Now, its all about the OS.
  • Suggestions (Score:2, Interesting)

    by nagashi ( 684628 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @06:30PM (#18834943) Homepage
    Install Quicktime Alternative (http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alt ernative.htm)

    Then try using media player classic to open the file. Quicktime alternative is a freeware quicktime codec, and will let you watch quicktime movies in an application of your choice. See also: http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternati ve.htm [free-codecs.com]

    There is no need to be tied to realplayer or quicktime on windows.
  • by Ant P. ( 974313 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @06:35PM (#18834973)
    Or Apple's Quicktime software, like many other badly-written windows apps with something to hide, is using a device driver to do its dirty work.
  • by robbiethefett ( 1047640 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @06:37PM (#18834995)
    i have a small home-based audio recording studio, and i'm becoming more involved in the whole computer music scene. from what i gather, quite a large number of studios have decided to switch entirely to Mac for production environments. i guess vista stepped on so many toes that a lot of shops that run XP have been migrating to Macs and plan to be exclusively apple shops, even before XP's end of life. for some reason, professionals seem to be pissed off that MS wants to control what they do with their own data.. can't imagine why.
  • Re:Title error... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Tickletaint ( 1088359 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @06:41PM (#18835027) Journal
    Sorry, how was that offtopic? To elaborate, Apple's answer to the tablet PC would have to be considered an upscaled iPhone, retaining a hi-res display and all the essential features of OS X, including most importantly Inkwell and multitouch.

    If you're particularly literal-minded and you think Apple's answer to the tablet PC would be, as in the PC world, a desktop computer crammed into slab format, then yeah, Apple wouldn't do that. Fortunately.
  • by robson ( 60067 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @06:43PM (#18835039)
    ...and we run Windows XP, not Vista.

    Any attempt to watch a Quicktime file from a local drive results in problems (usually an instant bluescreen, but sometimes general breakage -- taskbar not responding, apps not closing when ordered, menus not responding, that sort of thing).

    Viewing a movie that exists elsewhere on the network is fine. Viewing a movie from the Internet still breaks things, presumably because it's still getting cached to the local drive.

    They're not brand-name computers, but they were all put together by the same place, presumably with similar specs. Nobody's dug into it too deeply, we've just gotten used to moving all *.mov files to a network drive before viewing. :)
  • oh i beg to differ.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by plasmacutter ( 901737 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @06:43PM (#18835041)

    Apple software for Windows has always sucked rocks


    back in the day (circa 2002) i was working with a cruddy old machine and wanted to watch some divx on it.. but wmp kept stuttering.. so i installed quicktime and used it.. it used 20% less resources and its dependability was the first of many factors which got me to switch to mac.

    that said, quicktime 7 was a major step down from 6.x because they broke the caching (making it stutter even on osX), but that has nothing to do with the platform it runs on.
  • by csirac ( 574795 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @07:26PM (#18835299)
    Running PcAnywhere on your XP laptop that happens to be a Toshiba, and apparently in combination with a Symantec AV product (NAV IIRC) would result in a guranteed blue screen on every shutdown.

    Had never seen that before with this software combination on any laptop except some Toshibas at work back in the day.

    Nearest KB article I could find on Symantec was 2003112516321112, but it's only available via Google cache at http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:FBy7QXRHzIIJ:s ervice1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/pca.nsf/1ab3f998698d6 46f88256f48005b9e71/b998f8fb40c5dc3988256dea000204 6d%3FOpenDocument+site:symantec.com+toshiba+shutdo wn+pcanywhere&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=au&client=fire fox-a [72.14.253.104]
  • Nothing new for me (Score:2, Interesting)

    by teh moges ( 875080 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @07:59PM (#18835477) Homepage
    Quicktime has always caused me problems with any version of Windows at home. I have perfectly stable systems Windows systems (I know, it's weird) until I install Quicktime and then it's only a matter of time.
    I've never understood the reason why Quicktime needs to be installed in the system tray anyway. I play movies with it from time to time, I don't use it otherwise, and I doubt many do.
  • Re:Title error... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by myowntrueself ( 607117 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @09:18PM (#18835911)
    After all these years, it shouldn't be that easy to do. Vista was supposed to be the most secure operating system yet. Or so I recall.

    Maybe from MS's perspective it *is* more secure for the OS to crash... rather than the driver get a buffer overrun leading to priviledge escalation...
  • by SkullOne ( 150150 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @10:13PM (#18836223) Homepage
    You tell me. We ran traces on the program, provided them to Apple, it always showed the quicktime dll's crashing. It would only do it on machines reading from SCSI disks.
    There would also be horrible audio/video synching issues while only reading from SCSI disks.
    So whatever quicktime is doing to render audio and video, it has/had an obvious issues with SCSI disks.
  • by Malc ( 1751 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @10:34PM (#18836373)
    I've heard that BS before, from the Mozilla devs. That was a couple of years before the they admitted to a huge resource leak with images that caused some computers to BSOD. Perhaps you want to blame the graphics driver... but Mozilla was the only app that triggered it. They claimed it was impossible for an application to cause a BSOD so there couldn't be anything wrong with Mozilla. Turns out they were wrong and their pig-headedness meant a massive bug sat their for years.
  • by uberzip ( 959899 ) on Sunday April 22, 2007 @11:33PM (#18836731)
    This isn't a problem with Toshiba. My custom built machine at work does this as well. I custom built the machine some time ago just for Vista (of course then Vista was delayed and delayed). Its as follows: AMD x2 3800+, 2GB kingston memory, Nvidia 7600gs, nforce 4 motherboard (430 I believe). The machine was completely stable on XP. Ever since installing vista there is one thing that will blue screen it nearly every time - watching .mov files in iTunes. Opening actual .mov files outside of iTunes doesn't always bluescreen it but the videos play like a powerpoint show. I've installed every nvidia video driver out there, even the latest beta drivers.

    Of course, the other way to bluescreen my system is to install nvidia drivers. So perhaps its nvidia and not apple?

    In any case, Vista has been a terrible experience, and seeing as I'm in charge of the IT department at my company we have canceled our plans to upgrade anytime soon. Perhaps after sp1. We rely heavily on MS applications as we consult for other companies that use MS apps so going to Linux or Mac is not an option. But we'll stay with XP for as long as possible. In fact, as an admin I've loved XP. The improvement from 95 to 98 to 2000 and then XP and the improvement from NT 4 to Server 2000 & 2003 had really gotten my hopes up that Microsoft would deliver on Vista.

    Unfortunately, they FUBAR'ed it.
  • by CrossChris ( 806549 ) on Monday April 23, 2007 @01:07AM (#18837199)
    We know that Apple is not the problem because an application should never be able to invoke a BSOD, no matter how poorly written.

    There are many other well-known applications that will BSOD Vista. Locally stored .RA files have a 50:50 chance of knocking it off its' perch, for example. This appears to be a "security" function of the DRM measures, which are particularly badly written (unlike the rest of Vista, which is just poor).

    Don't worry kids. You'll still be able to play your games on XP, for a short while.

    If "Windows" is the answer, you're asking the wrong question!
  • by KDR_11k ( 778916 ) on Monday April 23, 2007 @03:12AM (#18837787)
    Considering the kind of crap that goes into multimedia applications these days it wouldn't surprise me if Quicktime had parts that needed to be run in kernel mode.
  • by yakumo.unr ( 833476 ) on Monday April 23, 2007 @07:09AM (#18838639) Homepage
    I had this exact same problem a couple of years ago, it was caused by bad (terrible) drivers for the Adaptec SATA card I had (1210sa, using Sil 3112 chipset).

    Moving the mov file to any drive not using that controller and it played perfectly.
    From the 1210sa, an instant unrecoverable lock would occur. maybe 5% of mov's I tried wouldn't lock the drive, but those that did it was a definite and 100% repeatable problem, irrespective of player used, or quicktime version.

    I reported it to Adaptec several times, as it was fixed and then broken again with different releases, but never acknowledged.

    Changed to a Promise controller instead.
  • Re:FreeBSD (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jimicus ( 737525 ) on Monday April 23, 2007 @08:33AM (#18838939)
    If you just went and compiled the code I wrote without thinking carefully about what you were doing, you have a serious security issue which you really ought to resolve ;)

    All joking aside, it's a basic forkbomb. Quite a few unixes and clones (clearly not FreeBSD) will just keep on generating processes until such time as the process table fills up, which takes a fraction of a second. And once the process table is full, no more processes can be started - you can't even log in because even if the logon process is running, once it's authenticated you it will try and execute your shell and fail.

    Someone upthread executed it with a ulimit - yes, that will prevent it from making your system unusable but that's a piece of userland configuration. The point I was making is that unless userland is appropriately configured (something which is omitted surprisingly often), it's quite easy to render a computer next to useless without crashing it as such, even from userland.

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