After update to Firefox & Flash Player, Firefox crashes when VDH is invoked.

[mas...@comcast.net]

This morning I updated both Firefox to 52.0 and Flash Player to 25.0.0.127 and now, when I click on the VDH icon to download a video, Firefox crashes.  It is very repeatable and insensitive to video selected or web page, even rejecting pages/videos that previously worked or still work using the Chrome version of VDH.  VDH seemingly does not like this new Firefox and/or Flash Player combination.

[mig]

Can you share a link to a video page where you see this ?

[mas...@comcast.net]

Like I said, any page will cause it. Here is one that just now caused a crash:  http://tensility.com/videos/solder-tab-connectors
Point me to any of your favorite web pages and I'll confirm that they too will cause a crash.
The popup and crash report typical to one of these are attached.

[mig]

By experience, this kind of crash is much more likely to be due to a disk than to a browser add-on. Basically, if your disk has bad sectors or something of that kind, the system call made by the application (Firefox) to write the file causes the app to crash.

To verify this:

• disable Flash and try to download that video. If it crashes, it is not related to Flash.
• use another add-on or download a file from Firefox (for instance, from http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/52.0/firefox-52.0.win64.sdk.zip) and setup the directory to the one where the VDH-downloaded videos go. If it crashes, it is not related to VDH.

Try using a disk verification utility to check your hardware.

[Mas...@comcast.net]

Firefox still crashes with the flash plugin disabled.  The download of the zip file you suggested caused no problem (neither has the download of anything else, including the use of Chrome's VDH to pull in videos to the same disk/folder that would be used by the Firefox VDH if it worked.  My hardware checks out as being fine.

[mig]

It is almost impossible for an add-on to cause the crash of the browser because add-ons do not run code at machine level (where it's easy to crash) but from a javascript interpretor run by the browser which protects itself against system errors. If you see the crash on a stable basis, you may have hit a bug in Firefox.

Next thing to try is to get rid of possible causes due to your browsing environment: create a new Firefox user profile and reinstall VDH (and only VDH for now) in this profile. Do you still experience the crash ?

[Mas...@comcast.net]

I have found and fixed the problem.  I had to change the viewing mode for the folder where the video files were being written from "videos" to "general items" using the following instructions.

To switch the viewing mode of your folder, right-click it and hit properties.
From properties, go to customize. From the customize tab, it should ask, "What kind of folder do you want?" and then a drop-down menu should appear under "Optimize this folder for:"
Click the drop-down menu and select "General Items" and that should remove the thumbnailing.

You may need to check the box saying, "Also apply this template to all subfolders"

Then hit apply, and then ok.

[mig]

Thanks for the feedback.

[anuhea55 00]

Mas, this is an interesting issue.  I'm not using v52, but was able to download your "Solder" video and saw the MP4 file.  The link played the video, and the Download Helper recognized the file as a 95mg MP4 and another MPEG file.  I wanted the MP4. However, after downloading, it did not play in VLC or Potplayer and when I looked at the properties/detail, it DID NOT indicate a length/width size like my other MP4 download helper video's.  I believe that FLV files also do not show this info, along with the movie time length. 

Your comments about the folder property peaked my interest, because I was not aware of this item.  When using Download Helper, for me the default directory has always been /dwhelper which is identified under folder properties/customize as "Video".  I looked at some of my other folders and did notice c:/download as saying "General", so I tried your Solder download to this other folder, but same thing...no width and did not play in either players.   I'm not sure what Flash (mozilla shockwave flash add-on says 25.0.r0) will do here or if V52 is the problem. 

Mas....you also said something about thumbnail.....what was this about...was the file showing up in your folder as a thumbnail rather than as a detail listing?

I'm also not sure if changing all your folders to "General" truly made yours work.  I guess I don;t understand what Video identification of a folder actually does to the files that are stored or played from there.  Maybe someone out there can see if the problem that Mas had is an interesting solution or not.  Maybe MIG can explain why /dwhelper got the "Video" custom property default.

[mig]

I'm afraid it's totally a Windows OS issue/feature and it's really not my area of expertise. Sorry.

[Mas...@comcast.net]

I think the root-cause of my problem is that there is a recently-added corrupt video file in the folder that, when Windows 10 tries to work its "video-folder magic" on the folder when it opened in the file browser (which happens when VDH prompts for the file-save location and uses the default location of this video folder) then the corrupt file causes the file browser to crash and it takes VDH and Firefox with it. This is only became an issue a few days ago. After the problem started and before I found the fix, I couldn't even open the folder in Windows without the file browser crashing.  What I need to do is to move some of the more recent files out of the folder until I can configure and open the folder as a video folder and then sort through the moved files to find the one that causes the problem and delete it.

[anuhea55 00]

Thanks Mas for sharing.  It now does not seem to be VDH that caused the problem.  Do you use VDH for all your downloads or do you sometimes download directly from a URL into the same folder like my default /dwhelper (which I believe was created when I first did the VDH add-on....somehow, this folder got the properties/customize ID as "Video" instead of "General".) 

So Firefox crashed when you tried a save-as after viewing a video using VDH to download the Solder link.  My download of the same url link still did not play after using VDH.  After you changed to "General", did you get it to re-play in a player or was it still not viewable?

What made you switch to "General"...maybes someone out there could enlighten us on this or "Video" folder designations.

Mas, keep us informed as to what happens, especially if VDH was used to download the bad file.  It's nice to read all the issues, VDH is a great tool and we all would hate if it had problems.

[Mas...@comcast.net]

It turns out that this was a Windows 10 crappy-patch problem that was introduced as part of this last Windows update cycle (03/15/2017). I discovered that another system here had the same newly-introduced file explorer crash problem when opening the video files folder.  I posted the question over on the WindowsSecrets forum along with my suspicion that it may have been cause by the most recent update and shortly thereafter I got this reply:

"There's a new patch out today KB4015438 ( 3/20/2017 ) that deals with video problems.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4015438"

I installed the new patch and after resetting the video folder optimization back to "video" (for whatever that might be worth) I find that I can now open that folder without it crashing the file explorer.

[anuhea55 00]

Mas, that is Fantastic! that you were able to pursue this issue.  I congratulate you on your posting and digging out this problem of yours.  I saw that I also had the Win10 update patch, KB4013429 successfully installed on 3/15/17....however I did not experience any crashing of file folders with either the "video" or to my /download that was "general".  I noticed that other users that followed your VDH comments did not indicate that anyone else had similar issues.  Maybe, for you,  that ..13429 Win update failed to load and caused a ripple effect or some other later security update failed.  Strange that no one else crashed!

I read the MS patch to KB4015438 and it's beyond me what the patch fixes, but if it took care of your issue....Great.  Also, thanks for your link to the WindowsSecrets forum.  I will bookmark for future reference although much is over our heads. I have not yet downloaded the patch....wanted to continue reviewing.  I also read on the net that "video" and "general" allows the file folders to display their contents in either pic thumbnails or detail listing or other format for faster display time.  The fact that "general" did the trick for you is really great..not sure what caused you to do this (I never knew of this option before)

On another note.  The "Solder video that caused the initial problem using VDH, although it did not crash my files folder.....I still cannot view.  There must be another issue that is local to the file.  I get a 97657kb MP4 file that has no width or length property.  It is playable when viewing the link, but not playable after VDH.  I used a 3 different players.  Anyway, Good Job!!!

[Mas...@comcast.net]

On Tuesday, March 21, 2017 at 7:57:56 AM UTC-7, anuhea55 00 wrote:

Maybe, for you,  that ..13429 Win update failed to load and caused a ripple effect or some other later security update failed. 

Like I said, I saw the failure on two totally different (other than they both were Windows 10) systems so it was not just a random failure of one patch failing to be installed. I suspect it's also related to the types of video files present in the videos folder as Windows tries to do its preview thing.
 

On another note.  The "Solder video that caused the initial problem using VDH, although it did not crash my files folder.....I still cannot view.  There must be another issue that is local to the file.  I get a 97657kb MP4 file that has no width or length property.  It is playable when viewing the link, but not playable after VDH.  I used a 3 different players.

I just downloaded the soldering file using VDH. The MP4 file that was created was 17.5Mb (18,455kb) big.  It plays just fine here using VLC Media Player. It says the resolution is 1280x738 (--> 1280 x 720)  and the H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1) codec is used for the video stream.

[anuhea55 00]

Very interesting Mas, I was just viewing the Windows Secrets link again and saw yours and some-other discussion on the Win10 patch ...13429 and the replacement ...15438 in the "March 2017 Windows 10 update problems".....wow, scary to those that are getting boot problems.  If you find the video file that caused the problem in your folder, post an update, since you probably used VDH to download.

On the "solder" file, I used your above link that gets redirected.  My spinning balls indicate a 95.4mb MP4 and a 1104mb MPEG.  I do not see the 17.5mb MP4.  Now, maybe its because I'm using an old version of VDH, v5.4.1....this has worked for me for all the mp4's that I needed from movie sites, but maybe not.  I am on FF 51.0.1, maybe VDH has a problem and that I should update.

[anuhea55 00]

Just updated VDH to 6.2.0, a little different, but I now get your "solder video that plays in my PotPlayer.  The length/width now show, I guess I never noticed any problems with my other downloads.  Now, I see for my other video downloads, a .part file along with the .mp4, that stays around till the download completes.  Did I read in these blogs something about being able to go directly to the mp4 without a .part.  What would be the downside of this, maybe conversions, when necessary, will not happen.  Doesn't hurt, since the .part disappears after successful completion.....you learn something every day.  Now I get to play with VDH to view settings and other things to read about.

[anuhea55 00]

Thanks to Mig, for his comments in a previous .part discussion.  The settings/behavior/download retries=0 worked for me, now I get no extra .part file and can view .mp4 files while it downloads.  This setting may not be for everyone, especially when it pertains to being able to to use the download crash recovery mechanism of VDH.  It's a choice, just something to be aware of.