cockpit error or bug?

[J David Ellis]

Running VLC 0.8.6d (wxWidgets inerface) on windows xp sp3rc, I hope to use VLC to drive a channel on a private television cable system which, to the computer, electrically and logically looks like a television set. after many hours of successful operation, running a VLC playlist, a vlc.exe application exception occurs; the windows doctor watson log shows "exception number c0000005 (access violation)."

I've read User Support - Help and searched the VideoLAN forums, including FAQ, Report Bugs and Documentation. Nowhere have I found this particular problem. New to this field, i can't determine whether the problem is a bug. And I'm not sure how much information is needed to get help.

Can someone offer advice on these questions?

The initial testing was done on a Pentium 4 computer 2.4GHz with 512MB of ram and a few dozen gigs of free drive space. Windows had never had a service pack installed. The video card is an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500.

The first access violation occurred after about 30 hours of repeating a playlist of seven .iso files (the content of which can be used to burn a movie dvd), each containing a movie of length one hour to one hour and 30 minutes. i estimate about ten hours required to run the playlist once before repeating.

I updated Windows with service pack 3 release candidate and the test ran 18 hours before an access violation occurred. I updated the video card driver and the next test ran 27 hours. I changed to a different set of .iso files, only four files in the playlist (approximately 5 hours to play the list), and the next test ran 45 hours before an access violation occurred.

The VLC Preferences have not been changed since VLC was installed. I have the windows doctor watson log and the system administration event viewer data for these crashes.

Is this a bug? What do I do next?

--David

[VLC_help]

If programs crashes and Dr Watson complains, it is usually a bug =) (it can be hardware issue also). Finding and fixing a bug that takes so long before it shows itself is very hard. You can try to change Video output module to another one to see if the problem has something to do with video card. If it happens with Windows GDI output, I am quite sure VLC has either memory leak (which also you should detect by watching VLC memory usage at every hour from task manager) or some other issue.

One option is to make scheduled task that closes VLC every X hours and starts new instance.