PlayVideo (Message Port error)

[djrikki]

Hi,

Any idea what could be causing the dialog box reading 'Error setting up message port!' to appear when calling the PlayVideo command?

It definitely is a Video as it passed the IsVideo() test, I can also GetAttributes() from it such as Width, Height and Format. But it just refuses to play.

I had it working before with the same set of videos, the only thing that has changed is that I am now using MUI Royale... however the video window is a regular hollywood display.

[Juan Carlos]

Well, if you are use sometime the V.A.M.P. under OS4 there are several problems as Hollywood hosting connections, Gurus-GrimReaper messages, when in other systems as MOS or Windows there aren't these problems, some bugs are for the OS4 and Hollywood incompatibility with functions perhaps, I don't know but there are problems in OS4 unexplained.

[airsoftsoftwair]

I got a similar report some months ago and it turned out that disabling CreateRexxPort() solved the problem.

Here's what I wrote back then: (in an email, not here on the forums)

I cannot reproduce this either. But it doesn't look like a Hollywood bug to me because CreateRexxPort() hardly does anything more than calling a system function to create a public message port and that's it.

My guess is that there's some problem when OS4 runs out of signals for message ports (an AmigaOS process may only allocate a certain number of message ports). The reason why it works without MUI Royale is that without MUI there are more message ports left for the process because MUI allocates its own message ports.

The only way this could be a Hollywood bug is that it crashes while Hollywood is trying to do the cleaning up. But I've now simulated this case by making CreateRexxPort() fail here and Hollywood cleans up correctly and shows an error message. So it's very likely not an Hollywood bug.

[djrikki]

Okay cool, so I disable the Port before the video begins playing and enable it again afterwards that bit I understand. However, there is no command for disabling the Port and my application requires Rexx support!

[airsoftsoftwair]

Yes, disabling the port is currently not possible.

[djrikki]

Well thats a damn shame, I hope you find a fix soon. For now I'll just have to disable Video Playback. It used to work in Jack, I don't know at which point it all suddenly stopped working.

[airsoftsoftwair]

Well, it might also be an OS4 problem because it doesn't occur on other systems. There is a message port limit per task but I don't think that Hollywood currently comes close to this limit.

[djrikki]

Okay I guess you need to investigate it further, at some point to find out where the 'blame' lies.