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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?"
Vista = BSOD
:)
There, fixed the title for you.
No, it couldn't... If you're running as an unprivileged user, the software you run shouldn't possibly be able to crash your OS.
Drivers can, and bugs in the OS can. User-run programs can only (accidentally) trigger one of those... in which case, that's a DoS exploit in the system.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I installed Vista on my MacPro - in 12 minutes, i had a successfully BSOD'd Vista by playing a standard DiVX 6.0 file on Vista. (yesssss... i installed the drivers for everything)
I think (i do not know - so back off, i'm guessing) that there is some kind of problem with Vista and video... at least, i'm seeing a trend.
Considering the amount of work Microsoft put into preventing people from playing (assumedly pirated) video, I don't think its much of a strech to believe that its much harder for developers to make video playback software. 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, but i don't recall the link. But it was quite long, very extensive, and seemed to me that Vista's goal was not to provide a system which would foster video content creation - but rather, just the opposite.
its rather sad, actually. Microsoft/Adobe and MS/AVID had the makings of at least pitiful competition for Apple/Apple & Apple/Avid... (Apple/Adobe? Yeah, not so much any more after NAB). I actually LIKE competition, because it means that Apple and their developers actually have to work to make better products.
With all of the pain that's obivously involved with working HD video (which inclueds VIEWING IT) on Vista, there won't be much competition. If Vista is a shitty at video work as its looking to be, i suspect that Apple will be able to kick back on the beach with a mai-tai and not have to evern try... i mean, HD playback is 100% zero effort (assuming you aren't trying to do it on a PowerBook 520c) in Mac OS X - there's no DRM invovled whatsoever (except for BR and HDDVDs).... and the video cards Just Work(TM), and Quicktime just works, and VLC just works and DIVX just works.... etc.
sucks to have your workflow based upon a product that is EOL in 7 months (Windows XP + ___________). Personally, i don't care. I've long stopped caring about the abuse people that use Windows for video work put themselves thru... sure, Windows did some things faster back in the day, but all of that is totally gone now, isn't it?
Now, its all about the OS.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
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.
i have a small home-based audio recording studio, and i'm becoming more involved in the whole computer music scene. from what i gather, quite a large number of studios have decided to switch entirely to Mac for production environments. i guess vista stepped on so many toes that a lot of shops that run XP have been migrating to Macs and plan to be exclusively apple shops, even before XP's end of life. for some reason, professionals seem to be pissed off that MS wants to control what they do with their own data.. can't imagine why.
"Luke, you've switched off your targeting computer, what's wrong?"
> from the puzzler dept.
The part that's puzzling is why we need to summon all the readers of the Slashdot front page to fix this guy's laptop.
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 /.
Where is the Undo button for my life? Not to mention the Esc key.
The article you probably mean is Peter Gutmann's A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, which memorably coined the phrase,
At least, we can hope.
you had me at #!
Perhaps Microsoft will be in a little bit more of a hurry when the hackers figure out what is causing the BSOD from Vista and work it into the next custom malware?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We know that Apple is not the problem because an application should never be able to invoke a BSOD, no matter how poorly written.
Here is an example of an idiot trying to look smart. Have you bothered to have someone look at the memory dump? What was the stop code? Did you check the event logs?
The fact is, it could be ANY of the three things mentioned or NONE of them. It could be an anti virus filter driver. It could be a memory access violation in Kernel Mode memory. It could have absolutely nothing to do with Vista or QT or even the Toshiba's drivers. It could be that the author is just stupid.
I'm leaning in the direction that this author is simply ignorant but since he felt he should write an article and place blame with minimal evidence to support his claim, he falls solidly in the stupid category.
The only fact that the author has presented is that he had a BSOD when using QT on Vista on Toshiba hardware when playing a local file. That only gives you suspects. A lawyer should know better. I've had occasions where customers swore up and down that one product was causing a BSOD and the memory dump pointed squarely at another product. Rarely (on XP) did I ever see a memory dump that actually pointed the finger at Windows. More often than not, I've seen memory dumps caused by filter drivers used by anti virus.
Perhaps Mr Fishkin should write more about being a lawyer because he damn well doesn't know much about computers.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
They claimed it was impossible for an application to cause a BSOD so there couldn't be anything wrong with Mozilla.
OK, so Mozilla had a resource leak. Clearly there was also a kernel or driver bug, because a BSOD is a kernel crash.
Aloha everyone,
:)
:) Of course, that in part was the point, right?
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.
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!
Isn't a corner stone of "stable" and "reliability" in an modern OS the inability of any app to cause failure by sucking up all resources?
um let me run this scenario by you. you're finishing up your long 226 legal brief in Microsoft word. you go to click file save, but the directory you are saving to has 400 files. windows does some internal file processing and starts eating up the final 10k of available physical memory. swapping begins to occur until your sound card that was playing your favorite midi throws an error because windows did not feed data in time. the sound card drive freaks out, and returns a failure to the midi app. the midi app, not prepared for this, starts an infinite loop eating all of your available memory. eventually you overflow the stack and your windowing system is hosed.
you shake the mouse and click repeatedly hoping to unfreeze the computer. you hit control alt delete, nothing happens. you reset the computer silently hoping word's autosave worked for once.
now, my question to you.. is the above story what you are implying is happening here? (answer this question honestly before you continue)
because that is what happened back in Windows 3.1. Since the creation of modern operating systems, we have learned to take advantage of advanced hardware and separate each application into its own memory space (see: Intro to Operating Systems at your local community college). Thus, a single application should NOT take down your entire system. If an application is causing a BSOD and there is no funky kernel-mode hardware access going on.. the fault is on the hardware or OS (to include drivers as well). Period.
If you wish to debate this, remember that I may have just found a way to compromise your system.