Open Video File Crash

[BetterRed]

OK, there are two shell extensions still running in Safe mode, I will have to uninstall them to eliminate them. One of them I've been using since 2002 and it was last updated in 2011, the other I've been using since 2009 and its been updated this year. And neither creates any grief with any other software - including the other three applications that use Qt.

But that will have to wait until after July. I have a workable solution.

BTW TortoiseSVN has a track record of being problematic, I know of two widely used multipane file managers that have had problems with it, I use one of l them, I think the other one might have a work around. But I don't think it was causing them crash, just misbehave.

BR

[KevinH]

One other trick mentioned in those bug reports was to rename the sigil application executable to sigil2 or anything really and try running the renamed app. If the bug no longer happens, then that seemed to indicate something related to registry entries being the problem. Seems like a strange thing to me but I have never used Windows nor had to deal with central points of failure like a registry, so I have no idea if this is a good test or not.

[BetterRed]

@KevinH - see https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...26&postcount=9

I uninstalled Sigil manually, cleaned the registry of every entry that related to Sigil - there weren't that many, some MRU entries and those Toasts I posted yesterday and a few other insignificant entries. Then I reinstalled. Which IMO is better than renaming.

What did surprise me is that trolltech writes entries for every QT application I have on my machine - including several calibre portables

BR

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I uninstalled Sigil manually, cleaned the registry of every entry that related to Sigil - there weren't that many, some MRU entries and those Toasts I posted yesterday and a few other insignificant entries. Then I reinstalled. Which IMO is better than renaming.

Surely renaming the exe briefly is simple enough to quickly try, though, right? If only to eliminate/confirm the reported behavior.

[BetterRed]

Duly done

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

I have exactly the same Windows version as BetterRed and changing the view settings also didn't cause Sigil to crash. (I tried all of them.)
As DiapDealer has already pointed out, it might be a third party shell extension that causes this issue.

Another possibility is a misbehaving graphics driver.

@BetterRed: Check the event log for relevant information.

Sorry - I forgot to respond to this. There's nothing untoward in the event log, I get daily reports from LOGalyze and the the graphics subsystem is working fine.

BR

[KevinH]

A google search on crashes while right clicking in file explorer and other apps really do show that almost all of them are caused by bad shell extensions (or conflicts between them) - just as Kovid said. According to many of the posts, in many cases safe boot was NOT enough to prevent the problem until the offending Shell extension was found and removed. The recommended approach was to run a binary search on ALL 3rd party shell extensions until the problem case if found.

The program of choice seems to be "ShellExView" which allows you to disable and enable shell extensions easily.

There also seems to be registry key setting that will allow Windows 10 to dump an error log when crashes happen. That is often used to help track down the offending item.

A error dump certainly can not hurt.

KevinH

[BetterRed]

Familiar with ShellExViewm been using it for years, along with many other tools from the same source.

I'm not interested in doing anything further with this right now. We have real world, mission critical deadlines to meet and a liveable with procedural solution.

In fact I wouldn't mind if you closed the thread until mid July when I will have time to do the things you want.

Can I get an answer to the question I put in here?

BR

[KevinH]

Because an .mp4 is simply a container type that can hold either audio or video and there is no easy way to tell from just the file extension. If loaded from an epub with the proper mime-type information, it should go to the correct folder.

To work around this issue many people change the extension to .m4v for an mp4 video file, and .m4a for an mp4 audio file. Sigil will now recognize these extensions as .mp4 of the correct type and will put them where they belong.

See https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil/issues/198

The proper mime-type for .m4v is video/mp4 and .m4a for audio/mp4.

epub3 native support for audio for is mp3 requiring no fallbacks.


KevinH


PS. .avi, .wmv, and .flv and the like are not epub3 known core file types and these will require fallback. See the known epub3 core media types at:

http://www.idpf.org/epub/30/spec/epu...re-media-types

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Familiar with ShellExViewm been using it for years, along with many other tools from the same source.

I'm not interested in doing anything further with this right now. We have real world, mission critical deadlines to meet and a liveable with procedural solution.

In fact I wouldn't mind if you closed the thread until mid July when I will have time to do the things you want.

Can I get an answer to the question I put in here?

BR

[DiapDealer]

In case it's not clear; right-clicking a particular folder in the Book Bowser and selecting "Add Existing Files" is not, in fact used to add existing, external files to THAT particular folder. The Add Existing Files feature is adding files to the epub ... to be placed in the folder deemed appropriate by Sigil's attempt to ascertain the media-type from the file extension.

[KevinH]

And to make the spec clearer, for all audio file types that are not audio/mpeg (.mp3) and audio/mp4 (.m4a) (the core types) you will need to create either an .mp3 or .m4a to act as a core media fallback. So to save space, it is better to simply convert other audio formats to one of these core types.

For video, the latest recommendation for maximum compatibility is to use video/mp4 (.m4v) or .WebM for video files. Again, trying to use .wmv, .flv, .avi audio (or video) files will generally not be a good idea as it will require fallbacks away from windows and flash specific video types.

Also note, that epub3 supports remote linking to resources although I am not sure how many e-readers will support that. If they do, you could host alternate ebook video resources on a website while keeping the core media-types physically inside the epub3.

Hope this helps.

[BetterRed]

@KevinH, DiapDealer - Thanks for the explanation re file types, actually I was surprised that I was able to add whatever I liked, I expected to be restricted to MP3 and MP4. I also hadn't spotted the File->Add->Existing files option that's why I was adding via the Book Browser folders.

I discovered what causes Sigil 0.9.5 to crash, and indeed it is shell extension. But I've had it in the menu for so long (since NT4 at least) I had forgotten it wasn't part of Windows, all it does is to create a flat zip of a folder's contents - Zip Folder.

FWIW - I reinstalled Sigil version 0.8.4. I think that's what I used when 'playing around' with adding media files to ePUB 2.0 a few years ago. That version of Sigil doesn't crash when I right click on a file in the Add Existing Files->Open File dialogue when Zip Folders is enabled.

However the issue has been rendered moot.

Yesterday my colleague demonstrated a different approach, rather than creating multimedia epubs, use an android application that pulls information down from the cloud, stores it, and presents it on demand. We've decided to go with that rather than EPUB 3.0. But not because of this problem, I hasten to add.

BR