We have been doing the same sort of thing for many years, and have only been having problems since upgrading to Win 2K from Windows NT. We always include an automatic daily restart in the kiosks, which has probably made the problem less obvious.
I was just in the process of trying to figure out whether the problem is related to one of the many dlls used.
Now your email leads me to think that perhaps the mpeg is the problem. Are you using an xtra to play the mpeg?
Maybe Tabuleiro have some insight into getting around this problem, since they make several of the mpeg xtras. Perhaps there is a difference between using the DirectMedia xtra, which we were using, and the MpegAdvance Xtra, which we use now but haven't yet put it to a full test.
In our case it would be relatively simple to convert to Quicktime, which we have avoided because of previous memory leak problems. I would appreciate it if you could tell me what functions you used to prevent the memory leaks with Quicktime?
Regards
Cath Sample Director Phosphor Essence
At 06:38 p.m. 20/01/2004 -0500, you wrote:
This is a question about running Director long-term on a touch-screen kiosk. We have an exhibit which is a basic push-a-button-see-an-mpeg2 movie situation. The movies are very short, like under a minute. There is a pause function and a stop function.
Shortly after installation, we got reports of the program freezing. We could not reproduce this in-house. We were referred to another developer who advised us that this has happened to them with both mpegs and .avis in Windows 98, 2K and XP. They said that it usually happens after quite a few cycles, and that it was a Windows multimedia problem, not a Director problem.
So we built a little tester with the MPEGs, which monitored freebytes, freeblock and bytes lost. Our results were interesting:
Running one movie after another constantly: never froze, no major memory leak
Running movies constantly but with pauses and continues: didn't freeze, no major memory leak
Running movies constantly but with stopping movies in the middle: freezes after 150-350 plays, no major memory leak
Stopping movies by jumping to the end and allowing them to finish "naturally": freezes after 1,500 plays or so
So we tried QuickTime, and we did see some memory loss. So we added some functions to clear the memory, and we haven't seen much memory loss until about 40,000 plays, and then the numbers of bytes lost become some crazy number at least 6 or 7 digits long. However, it didn't freeze, but the screen started showing some screen and stage refresh problems and I got the sense system stability was at risk.
This museum gets thousands of visitors a day, and each visitor might see up to 10 movies, or more.
Before we go all the way and change the exhibit to use QuickTime and recompress quite a few movies and reinstall, as well as recommend daily restarting, I wanted to check to see if anyone has any insight into a) the "known problem" with Windows and movies (we've been doing this for 6 years and didn't "know" about it) and b) to see if anyone has any suggestions to try.
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