One Video That Does Not Load

[Tricks]

◘ I think I found the issue

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Got 3 x264 mp4 vids from a site, 2 of them 1440p, and strangely one does not load. 2D players can play it, and I've downloaded it twice just in case it was corrupted somehow.

Clicking on it loads the vid name in the seek bar, and the 'play' icon is highlighted as if it is playing, but the vid stays on 0% progress and nothing displays.

At this point the interface is responsive and I can go into folders etc, but clicking on any video, including the problematic one causes the program to freeze, including the pointer + 3D controller.

A SteamVR message then appears saying it is 'waiting' for HereSphere, but the waiting doesn't end. I have to end the task.

How can I get debug info to you to see what is causing the problem? The program doesn't actually crash, so I'm thinking there will be no crash log.

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◘ The codec info is identical to the 1440p one that does work, except for FPS, some bit rate stuff, and the broken one uses 10bit colour vs 8bit.

I then remembered reading one dev post that mentioned something about bit rate requirements. Found the post and it says max bit rate is 8-bit if using x264 + Media Foundation.

Windows Media Player (which uses Media Foundation) does indeed hang when loading the video, so it seems to confirm.

Would it be possible to detect if the user is trying to run a 10-bit video before it loads and causes an inevitable lock-up? I remember when I suggested showing video length you said you didn't know how to read metadata yet, so that could be a problem.

Actually though.. loading the vid is not what causes the lock-up, it's the switching to another video after. So in that window of time before the user clicks another video maybe there is something you can do to detect if there was a problem with the last loaded video and do something to avoid the impending lock-up.

[HereSphere]

Thanks for reporting the issue. Media Foundation doesn't have a built-in method of detecting the bit-depth of the video, and there's a bug with their h264 decoder that won't gracefully exit from loading 10-bit videos. This means there isn't a way to prevent the crash, other than using another 3rd party library to detect the video format.

With my current time constraints, I think it's better if I just put all my effort into getting the MPV playback option to work, so we can just avoid all of the Media Foundation bugs altogether. It's pretty frustrating that Microsoft won't fix their Media Foundation bugs.

[Tricks]

Acquired a new batch of 33 videos only to find none of them work!
(shows the new pink h265/8-bit colour error message)

This time they are .mkv 8-Bit Colour x264, and Windows Media Player CAN actually play them! which is usually how I can diagnose if it's a Media Foundation problem or not.
So this is a strange one!

I can upload a 16mb sample if needed

*Whirligig set to Media Foundation mode can play them too, so I'm hoping it's a bug of some sorts and can be easily solved.

[HereSphere]

If you have a sample, I can take a look at them and see if I can debug the issue.

[Tricks]

Uploaded and went to just triple check that the file didn't work...but it did :l

I wondered if you had made a hotfix, but then I found the reason! false alarm 😅

[HereSphere]

Lol, out of curiosity, what caused the issue?

[Tricks]

When following a setup guide for that SVP app it said to disable some Microsoft video codecs via a Codec Tweak tool. I had troubleshooted by reverting those changes and must have tested Whirligig sometime after doing that, hence why it worked with that app. With those codecs disabled Whirligig also cannot play the files 😅

From a prior incident I learnt that Windows Media Player can fallback to LAV if MF is broken/disabled somehow, so that's probably why it could play the files even with the codecs disabled.