VLC 1.0 freezes computer

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VLC 1.0 seems to randomly freeze up windows XP home when playing back a DVD, xvid(.avi container), and h.264(.mkv container). The video stops, a bit of sound loops, and the nothing windows is fully frozen (cannot crtl+alt+del). Cannot provide log report because system fully freezes when this problem occurs, have to reboot. The problem does not occur again at the same spot on a video file. Like I said, happens randomly but frequently. Have not had this problem in Windows 7 RC (I dual boot, so same graphics card).

I read in another post that the media players cannot crash the system. However the problem only occurs in VLC. When I playback videos in other media players the freezing of the system does not occur. I have a ATI Radeon 4870 with the latest drivers ( Catalyst 9.7). Problem also occured with Catalyst drivers 9.5 and 9.6. Had no problems playing the types of media files mentioned above with VLC 0.99a.

For those of you who might reply, your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[rocket888]

Can vlc crash a computer? Well, technically, no, but vlc certainly can make requests of drivers and/or libraries that will crash the system. So, who's fault is it? Well, from a software developer standpoint, the finger will always be pointed to the drivers, since only drivers run at the protected kernel level - where bugs can bring down the entire system. Anyway, that's the computer science answer, and developers will not budge from this.

Practically, however, what this means is that your only hope of a resolution is to look to updating your drivers and libraries. It's highly likely that you are NOT using the identical drivers in xp vs windows 7, and even if you are, it's also possible that windows 7 has added code to safeguard from driver's causing crashes - something they should have done decades ago - and have been slowly doing, especially in new versions of windows. If you have to live by 3rd party software (to sell your OS) you better make sure they don't shoot you in the foot and blame it on you.

So I would try to use divide and conquer techniques - i.e. swapping things, like video cards, drivers, libraries (try switching between direct-x and opengl) etc. until you can find a combination that seems to repeat failures in one mode and then work in another and then report back here. Turn on the message window and see if there's something that always is reported before a crash. Maybe someone will recognize something or have a workaround.

Also note that even if other programs (e.g. windows media player) don't end up in a crash on the same media, doesn't mean that it's not a driver issue when vlc leads to the crash. It all depends on how the software calls on the drivers and libraries.

I guess, however, that a freeze might not be considered a true crash and that possibly vlc could cause this, but I've actually had the opposite situation on my XP laptop. Here it was always WMP that froze my computer and so I had to swtich to using VLC which has never froze my system.