Media Player Hangs with Hyper-Threading On

From: itzkakarot (itzkakarot_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 12/08/04 

Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 10:07:03 -0800

Greetings experts,

This is a rather difficult and intricate problem that my company is having
with several of our systems that hopefully you all may be able to help me
with it. I have also posted this question in the "Windows Media\Windows
Media Player" newsgroup in hopes that they may be able to help.

At my company, we create multi-channel solutions which display ADs in the
following formats: static images (JPG), Flash movies (SWF), or full motion
videos (MPG ,MPEG, AVI, WMV). We discovered a unique situation where the
Windows Media Player component hangs (Not Responding) after playing for
several hours. This issue ONLY arises when we are attempting to play at
least 2 movie files on two separate monitors, and the length of time at which
a particular monitor hangs is random. For the most part, which monitor hangs
is also random, however the monitor in Channel 1 seems to fail less
frequently.

We have narrowed down this problem somewhat, and we think that what's
happening is two movies are attempting to do something at literally the same
exact time (whether it's two movies trying to start together, or one trying
ot start and the other stopping, or some other occurrence). The software is
the only thing that fails, and when it does the hardware is fully functional
without any issues. This problem is directly related to Hyper-threading. We
run all HT processors now and when we turn HT off, the system never fails.
Once we turn HT back on, it fails in a matter of hours (sometimes minutes).

We have run tests on several different machines with multiple hardware
configurations and multiple file formats (MPG, AVI, WMV). All tests have
show failure with HT turned on, and success with HT turned off. I have
listed the harware specs of our test machines below. Is it possible there is
an issue with multiple instances of Media Player and the Hyper-Threading
technology? I know there was an issue with TV-Tuners and HT that MS released
a hotfix for (KB article: 817589). We have about 100 clients that have
multiple multi-channel systems and we have never seen this issue (in 5 years
of operation) until now.

Here is a list of the different hardware configurations we have currently on
our test systems. We have several PCs with the exact same configuration.
On all of these configurations, turning HT on ALWAYS causes an eventual
failure (Not Responding) and turning HT off NEVER causes a failure.

System 1:
Windows XP SP1
Pentium 4 - Hyper Threaded 3.00 GHz
512 MB RAM
Colorgraphic Xentera GT (AGP Card) - 2 channels
Colorgraphic Xentera GT (PCI card) - 2 channels, only 1st is used
Notes: The third channel (PCI Card) seems to fail the most frequently.

System 2:
Windows XP SP1
Pentium 4 - Hyper Threaded 2.80 GHz
512 MB RAM
Colorgraphic Xentera GT (AGP) - 2 channels

System 3:
Windows XP SP2
Pentium 4 - Hyper Threaded 3.00 GHz
512 MB RAM
Colorgraphic Xentera GT (AGP) - 2 channels

System 4:
Windows XP SP2
Pentium 4 - Hyper Threaded 2.60 GHz
512 MB RAM
Colorgraphic Xentera GT (AGP) - 2 channels

We've seen failures in both SP1 and SP2. All systems have all current
updates and patches from Windows Update. Any help you can offer in this
matter would be very much appreciated!

Thanks,
itzkakarot

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