The Lighting Controller

I can confirm : no need to press play for the codec to be called. IE: Simply when adding a media file, the codec is called to retrieve its length.

Yes Luc,
you are right. What I'm trying to explain is the fact that if I play the video using the videoplayers on the PC everything works, when I try to do any edit (not run, just only edit the .tml file through showxpress, so the codec is not playing any video) on a timeline that has a video, the showxpress program crashes, and with "crashes" I mean stops functioning and shutdown.
If you don't have any codec installed the lightshow (in terms of DMX stream) works but you don't have any reproduction of the video, but doesn't crash.

Niffo wrote:Did you try with another video format ?
Did you try to install "K-Lite" Codec Pack ?

Pay attention the K-lite is not fully compatible with windows 10 as far as I know. What I know a new K-Lite Codec Pack has been released in March 13, version 13.0.0. Only this one is fully compatible with Windows10.

In the meantime I have found the following news:

Solution for crashing players after Windows 10 update KB4013429

Monday March 20th 2017

This Windows update contains a new version of the file CompPkgSup.dll which has a bug that can cause applications to crash. It only happens when an application uses the Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder or Audio Decoder on systems where MPEG-2 is activated in that decoder. That is either when you installed the DVD Player app from Microsoft, or if you upgraded from Windows 7.

Because my problem started after a massive Windows10 update, could be related to my issue. In the next days I will try to see if it is related to my problem. I will keep you informed.

Edit: Microsoft has fixed this problem in a new update KB4015438 (released on March 20th).

All this infos come from the following url
https://www.codecguide.com/

Made all the updates suggested from Microsoft and new K-Lite codec installed.
The system seems to be more stable, but crashes still happen.
The error logged in the file TheLightingController_Err.log is

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Le 24/03/17 - 23:25
Fonction : Engine thread TIMEOUT ! : Live
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Any ideas?

Just a guess again, but it looks to me that "Live" is trying to figure out the length of the file and cannot achieve it. Did you try with other video files? AVI for example?

Luc, I don't understand why you are insisting on the kind of video format.
By the way, I've converted all the files in AVI format.
Same behaviour. Crash.
But now, thanks to your suggestion, I've used a more systematic approach in digging into the problem.

Checked all the 16 timeline files and I found one of them with an "anomaly", a unexpected file dimension: 220kbyte!!! For a 4 minutes timeline, with more or less 23 scenes.
Being a simple timeline, easy to recreate, I decided to delete it, removed the button from Live, created a new timeline, with the previous used video (MOV extension, AVI is too big) and audio tracks, added the needed scenes and saved.

BOOM!!! No more problems. I have MIDI-Interfaced Showxpress to Ableton that sends continuously midi command to select each 3 minutes differents timelines. More than 4 hours without problems. Before, only 2 seconds and than crash.

Please consider the topic as solved, but I'm definitely surprised about the absence of any post from the support team. Especially when I've quoted the error log generated by showxpress program. Who develops software knows why an exception or an error triggers such messages reported in an error log file, if not why to foresee an error log file?

I'm glad for you that you resolved the issue. The reason why I insisted on trying various video file types is that I experienced some problems with other softwares using MOV files (originated on a Mac). AVI is more "native" on a PC than MOV, that's the way I cured the problem with the other program. BTW, AVI, like MOV, is only a container, able to use many different codec's, and here again, it might make the difference. For example when you say that AVI files are too big, it depends only of the codec you're using. A DVIX (or XVID) encoded AVI file is often smaller than an equivalent MOV file.

Often, buy not in my case,al so using the dvix codec.

BTW the problem is not completely solved, random instability esperienced, i will definitely migrate to Mac

Migrating to a Mac might be a solution. Maybe not. Maybe your PC just needs to be a little bit optimized for better audio/video perfs? It's certainly not always done when you buy the machine...
I'm not a video expert, I'm a sound engineer first, so I might help for audio.

Your help will be very welcome. I will consider your offer.
Many thanks