Need some help with videos causing proclaim to crash

Hi Guys,

I have posted about this a few times before but i am still having issues with proclaim crashing when trying to play videos - this only happens occasionally though. I have done some more digging when this occurs and have found some interesting things..

Proclaim when it is running normally with no issues usually uses around 300-350Mb of RAM. When i get an issue with it crashing it can reach a lot higher. One crash it got to 750Mb as can be seen in the attached image. I also had the issue happen on another computer - a much more powerful laptop which has never had a problem before - and it reached 1.2Gb of RAM being used (i dont have the screenshot unfortunately). Is it possible there is a memory leak??

As can also be seen in the other image, Proclaim seems to be slamming only one core of our machine. The other issue is with the use of RAM, as can be seen in this same image, where we have 4Gb installed but proclaim only seems to be able to use 2Gb (as can be seen, for some reason the free memory is only around 250Mb).

I am hoping that our issues will be fixed with a new motherboard and extra RAM, which we are saving for at the moment, but i just wanted to see if anyone could shed some further light?

Thanks,

Jordan

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Scott Alexander

Hello Jordan, thanks for the detailed feedback. I'm sure someone has already asked you to make sure you've updated your video drivers to the latest version? The reason I ask is because we have found the "out of memory" issues are often caused a bug in a video driver, exacerbated by video playback and something we don't have any control of.

However, we have certainly had our own memory leaks in the past and if you can provide any repro steps that cause memory usage to grow and stay high we'll definitely take a look.

Jordan Robb

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/612479#Comment_612479

Hi Scott,

Yes we have updated our drivers, they are the latest available. Our graphics card is an AMD Radeon HD 5700 Series and we have driver version 14.100.0.0 which is dated 17/4/14.

I have some more observations from our service this morning, where we have had issues again (today's service was named "Sunday 3rd August"). We generally have a video in the warm-up which is a countdown supplied by you guys - this worked fine this morning. We then move onto a few songs, two of which had video backgrounds today. As soon as we got to the first video background song ("Peace in me"), there was an immediate lag and the video did not start, however it showed up as a static background. Moving through the verses was pretty laggy and Proclaim seemed to seize up once or twice, but managed to recover.

I then decided to take Proclaim off air and start it back on air to see if that would help. When it was off air i checked the resources being used and Proclaim was using over 800MB of RAM (as i mentioned in the previous post, the normal is around 300-400). I then put Proclaim back on air and moved into our final song "Mighty is the Power of the Cross". This song also had a background video which did not start (this one is included in Proclaim). I decided to watch the resources more closely this time and found that every time i moved to the next slide, the RAM being used increased by about 25MB and this never seemed to be cleaned up, as it kept compounding and eventually made it up over 1.1GB of RAM being used. I also found that whenever i hovered over a slide and the preview popped up, the RAM increased again and didnt reduce.

Could there be an issue with memory clean up as well?

Thanks,

Jordan

Scott Alexander

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/613755#Comment_613755

What you're describing definitely sounds like a memory leak related to video playback. If you could create a copy of your presentation in its current state (right click Duplicate in open menu) for us to test that would be helpful. Then I would recommend replacing all motion backgrounds with motion backgrounds from the Proclaim Pro Media collection. It's curious that the warmup video didn't cause issues so I want to be sure it's not related to the videos themselves.

While we work to debug this issue I don't recommend using the motion backgrounds that caused the memory to grow today in an actual service. When a 32 bit process leaks memory and gets to around 1.2gb it will crash unexpectedly. Thanks for your patience as we work to resolve this issue.

Scott Alexander

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/613763#Comment_613763

While we work to debug this issue I don't recommend using the motion backgrounds that caused the memory to grow today in an actual service.

[:$] Just realizing that you're in Australia and have already had service! When I first read your post I was thinking you were referring to service preparation. Glad the leak didn't cause a crash during your real service!

Jordan Robb

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/613764#Comment_613764

Hi Scott,

Unfortunately it was in our actual service this morning! It generally tends to play up more during our services, but its the main time we use it so that is probably why..

I have duplicated today's service, so feel free to have a play and see what you can find out!

Thanks,

Jordan

Jordan Robb

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/613764#Comment_613764

Hi Scott,

Just wondering if you guys have had a chance to look into this issue any more? We will try using pro media only backgrounds this week, but would really like to be able to continue using our own setups as well!

Thanks,

Jordan

Spencer McKimson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/614882#Comment_614882

Hey jordan,

So I played around with the presentation you provided and I could not reproduce the issue. I ran the presentation for a lengthy period of time with no crash and my memory stayed at around 400 mb. Please try using pro media only videos and see if you can reproduce the issue.

Jordan Robb

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/615002#Comment_615002

Hi Spencer,

This week we just tried scrapping video altogether apart from a countdown video in the warmup.. That video crashed and so we had no countdown into the service It was a pro media video as well. I am starting to suspect highly that it may be an incompatibility with proclaim and some of our hardware, but no clue how to diagnose the issue further.

We have purchased a new motherboard and some new ram which should arrive in the next few weeks. Unfortunately if this does not fix the issues we have been having we may have to abandon Proclaim (which personally i don't want to do at all, because i love the program and the idea behind it - but if it doesnt work every week, i can't justify using it!)

Any other ideas at all what i can do?

Cheers,

Jordan

Spencer McKimson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/616111#Comment_616111

Any other ideas at all what i can do?

I am sorry to hear that you are still running into issues with videos. I am curious, do you have any remote login software or anything similar installed on your machine (such as logmein, gotomeeting, etc.)? These tend to cause problems with Proclaim playing videos and have caused crashes and hangs in the past. If by chance you do have any of these on your computer, uninstall them and try to reproduce your issue.

Also, are there any other things that you do during your service before the crash happens that might lead to this issue? I will keep on trying to reproduce a memory leak and if there are any steps I am missing other than playing the videos/video backgrounds, I would like to implement them and track down this potential problem.

Jordan Robb

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/616192#Comment_616192

Hi Spencer,

No there arent any remote login programs or anything similar.

This morning we had just one video in our service, which was a countdown supplied by proclaim. This did not play (just showed a static picture of the start of the video) during the warm-up loop and so our timing was out and we lost sound. Silly me though, i didnt check how the memory was going and so i found out into our 4th song, that the memory had been leaking because the slide background came up but no words and then i tried the next song and just nothing came up. At that point i checked the usage and it was up about 1.3gb again...

I then closed Proclaim, but as usual the process stayed in the background until i had to kill it. This memory leak is getting ridiculous as i cant use proclaim properly. I don't think i've had a week that has worked properly in the last few months which is really bad....

I've done as Scott suggested and updated to the latest drivers, but this obviously hasnt really worked.

We are hopefully putting a new motherboard and RAM in this week so hopefully that will work. If not i don't know what we are going to do, as i can't keep using a program that fails every week. I still can't figure out if it is a hardware problem or software problem though which is causing a lot of frustration!

I know i keep asking but are the any other ideas? Is it possible to have someone have a look at our system one time through a remote login program or something similar? I know there is quite a big time difference, but we need to get this working!

Scott Alexander

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/617228#Comment_617228

To isolate a potential video driver issue you could try disabling hardware acceleration by setting the registry key described here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970912(v=vs.110).aspx#disablehardwareacceleration

If the memory leak cannot be reproduced with hardware acceleration disabled then we can be sure it's a video driver issue.

Jordan Robb

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/617234#Comment_617234

Hi Scott,

I tried to find the correct registry key, but couldnt locate it. I tried other ways to disable hardware acceleration but none of those seemed to work either so i couldnt test this.. I went into regedit and searched through to the microsoft area, however i couldnt find the Avalon.Graphics and the associated key that needs editing. Have i missed a step somewhere trying to find this?

Cheers,

Jordan

Scott Alexander

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/617702#Comment_617702

Hey Jordan,

The key doesn't exist by default. If the application can't find it then it assumes the default value. You should be able to rename the file located here from disableHWAcceleration.reg.RENAME to disableHWAcceleration.reg and double click it to create the key.

Jordan Robb

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/620465#Comment_620465

Hi Scott,

I have done that and not had much luck.

Also we have just updated the motherboard and RAM, however now when we downloaded proclaim we got the Beta version (1.24 and just updated to 1.25). With both of these i have had a 5 second lag trying to change slides. What could be causing this?

Thanks,

Jordan

Scott Alexander

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/621347#Comment_621347

Following up offline.