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My video playback application started crashing randomly on me a couple of days ago. I had initially chalked it up to a dodgy video files, since I'm rather used to having video decoders crash on marginal data. However, after it kept happening on some known-good files, I attached a debugger and broke into the crashed application.

And then promptly swore when I saw d3d9d on the top of the call stack.

See, I occasionally do a bit of 3D graphics, and when doing so, I set Direct3D to run with the debug runtime and the "break on D3D error" setting enabled. This is great when doing D3D development, but not so good when running a video player that uses 3D to display video and occasionally makes some minor transgressions. It hasn't occurred to me that the setting I was tweaking was also screwing over the video player parked in the corner of the screen.

Of course, this isn't the first time I've done this -- Titan Quest went from painfully slow to only moderately slow once I'd realized my mistake. I also had something similar happen when I had forgotten that I'd installed the DirectShow debug runtime and couldn't figure out where the timestamp display in the middle of the video player was coming from.

Comments

This blog was originally open for comments when this entry was first posted, but was later closed and then removed due to spam and after a migration away from the original blog software. Unfortunately, it would have been a lot of work to reformat the comments to republish them. The author thanks everyone who posted comments and added to the discussion.