Video Won't Play/Proclaim Crashes Often

Joshua Yates

Ok...I'm at my absolute wits end here. I will do my best to temper my frustration. 😀 

Every Sunday, we have at least one thing happen with Proclaim in the middle of our service.

• At times, the text doesn't move on cue...we hit the button to progress the lyrics and can sometimes count to 10 before the lyrics actually move to the next set.
• Video backgrounds (for songs) play when we first start the program, but the longer the program runs, it seems to "degrade" and slow down.
• This morning I had a sermon intro video that would not play at all. It played fine before the service, but once we were in the middle of the service, we tried to play the video and...nothing. Had a good minute of dead air waiting to see if it would actually play.

I have been in touch with customer support before and I was told the program was having issues accessing the video file and it was timing out. The CPU jumps all OVER the place during the service. Most Sundays we have to restart the program during practice because the program locks up. The only way we can do that is to stop the Proclaim processes in the system tray.

Unfortunately I am NOT the one running the program on Sundays...I'm the pastor of the church...but I'm also the "tech guy." 😀 

We have an AMD quad-core machine running at about 3.2 ghz (if I remember correctly), a 1 GB memory card and 8 GB of RAM on board. Ultimately, we really shouldn't be having these kinds of issues. This is the third computer that we've put into service in an attempt to get Proclaim to work correctly. We've upgraded each time to where we are now and my computer guy is not sure where to go from here. 

Can anyone offer help? We are getting to a point where it just needs to work.  

Scott Alexander

Hello Joshua, 

Sorry to hear about the issues Proclaim is causing your church. It looks like your church has been using Proclaim for quite a while now. Have these issues always been there? Is there anything unique about your cabling configuration (splitters, converters, etc.)? 

I have been in touch with customer support before and I was told the program was having issues accessing the video file and it was timing out. The CPU jumps all OVER the place during the service. Most Sundays we have to restart the program during practice because the program locks up. The only way we can do that is to stop the Proclaim processes in the system tray.

What you're describing sounds like a memory leak, likely related to the video driver, exacerbated by video playback. The embedded Windows Media Player gets into a corrupted state and leaks memory, on top of failing to play the videos. It's an issue that affects some Windows systems but we haven't been able to isolate it to a specific video driver combination. Disabling hardware acceleration as described here almost always resolves the issue but can result in poor performance. Have you tried this? Some users have been able to install an updated driver from the manufacturer website and the issue goes away.

We're working on an alternative video playback method for Windows using DirectShow. I'd love to get a beta build running on your system and see what the results are. 

In the meantime I recommend making sure your video drivers are up to date and if the issue persists try disabling hardware acceleration and see how the performance is. Please let me know how this goes, I really want to find a way to make this right for you.