The case of the crashing mplayerc
2012-04-28
Decheng (Robbie) Fan
Today I found on my computer my mplayerc crashes when playing an MOV file. I thought there might be something wrong in its settings. The current environment looks like below:
Installed componnents:
Ringz Studio Storm Codec (containing mplayerc and ffdshow)
ffdshow
FormatFactory
I uninstalled ffdshow, Storm Codec and reinstalled them. mplayerc still crashes. It even crashes when playing an OGG file.
I found it doesn’t crash when running under an administrator account (I’m running as normal user).
Later I used Mark Russinovich’s procmon to trace the crash process. I guess there is something wrong in its configuration. I found registry keys under HKCU. They’re GNU and Gabest. The GNU key contains ffdshow settings. I deleted the key. mplayerc still crashes. I deleted Gabest key. It still crashes. By searching through the procmon trace, I found another one under HKCU\Software\Classes\VirtualStore. This is the virtualization by Windows Vista to store data for applications that writes to system settings when running under normal user. I found there is also a Gabest setting. Under it there was a key pointing to a ffdshow dll directory that is used by FormatFactory. Oh, that’s why. I deleted the key and it works!
Another issue solved with the help from the utilities from Sysinternals and Mark Russinovich!