QuickTime .MOV + Toshiba + Vista = BSOD

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?"

Comments

Seams Im not alone.

[IconKing]

I got a Toshiba Protege M400 about a mont ago. And I have had this problem consitantly. Since I watch alot of Video Podcast using iTunes. I have searched the web for solutions to tis problem and have gotten noware. Hopefully now that it made slashdot somthing will get done about it.

kind of rediculous

[sentientbrendan]

that he blames quicktime for a BSOD...

Nothing but a bad driver, bad hardware, or a *bad kernel* can cause a BSOD (read kernel panic). It doesn't matter that other movie players don't cause it. If the driver's and kernel didn't have a bug, it would be impossible for *any* userspace application, quicktime or otherwise, to cause a kernel panic.

Quicktime isn't the greatest movie player ever... but it couldn't possibly be at the root of this problem. It is clearly simply exposing an underlying problem.

Axiotron ModBook

[mr_zorg]

Nothing from Apple yet, but you can always checkout the Axiotron ModBook... Sounds interesting.

Re:I think you answered your question already.

[taoman1]

TFA concludes by blaming it on Apple. I'm no Apple fanboy, but I don't see that at all. Unless I am misreading TFA, everything worked fine until the patches and updates were installed. I would suggest those are the problem. If they were Tablet updates, that's where the blame lies. If they were Vista updates, then the problem is there. And i agree, this is a support call, not news on /.

article (Vista - longest suicide note in history):

[toby]

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

The article you probably mean is Peter Gutmann's A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, which memorably coined the phrase,

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history

At least, we can hope.

Update your player.

[DrYak]

except the format in question... VLC can't play most modern quicktime movies.

You know that there has been a few update since version 0.01, don't you ? ;-)

Seriously, almost any modern MOV file either uses standard MPEG 4 (MPEG-4 SP/H263 and AVC/H264) or some variation of (Sorenson is a derivative of H264). The former is a standard, the later was successfully reverse-engineered and implemented in FFmpeg a couple of years ago.
Even the latest WMV compression formats are currently being implemented into FFmpeg and thus available to VLC.

RealVideo is pretty much everything that is still in use today and not supported by VLC. Specially since the advent of video Podcasts, PSP and cameraphones, there's a strong nove toward standardizing on non proprietary codecs like the various MPEG4.

Problem SOLVED! Re:Where's the memory dump?

[Question Guy]

Aloha everyone,

I'm out here and thanks in part to Slashdot, my M400 tablet is playing quicktime movies like a champ now :)
The rant below aside, I DO very much appreciate the community thought that went into this, the response was great and that seems to have gotten the attention of Toshiba, which has issued a new RAID driver.

So, for whatever reason I still don't understand, Quicktime was accessing hard drives , those controlled by the SATA RAID controller in the laptop AND the ones hooked up by USB (external drives)in such a different way that the computer BSOD'ed every time.
I don't pretend to understand it fully, I just knew from the start that it was some fundamental level of tinkering I couldn't do on my own.

A hearty thanks to everyone who offered advice, called me or the author an idiot, or delved deeper into information that couldn't have been contained in the paltry few sentances I wrote for the story submission. hehe. I went out to lunch to buy some RAM, and there were 200 posts, so I'm sorry I wasn't more involved in giving MORE information. I know that everyone needed it, but I missed the window on timing, I think... who knew it would get accepted and start up such a fire-storm of responses?
It reminds me of that maxim "Whe you assume, you make an ass out of u and me. :) Of course, that in part was the point, right?
Submit a vexing problem to Slashdot, give just enough information for people to identify it and hope and pray that someone smart, informed, kind slashdotter would know the answer when all the google queries in the world, tech support hours wasted and dead end hunches didn't get me anywhere.

Hooray for everyone!

In other words, they were both wrong

[istartedi]

An application shouldn't consume excessive resources.

If an application attempts to consume excessive resources, the OS should not allow that. Appropriate responses might include failing to provide the resource, or terminating the application. A BSOD terminates everything--plainly not the correct response.

Now, considering the .MOV+Toshiba+Vista situation... something in kernel space is plainly wrong. It might be MS code or Toshiba code. We don't know. Something in application space might be wrong too; but it makes sense to fix bugs in code that runs in the kernel first. Then, if the application "hangs" or triggers a more manageable exception (The little popup window that doesn't crash the whole OS, whatever they call that on Vista) then we know that the application had problems too. If that doesn't happen, then the application was innocent all along.