• AnyStream is having some DRM issues currently, Netflix is not available in HD for the time being.
    Situations like this will always happen with AnyStream: streaming providers are continuously improving their countermeasures while we try to catch up, it's an ongoing cat-and-mouse game. Please be patient and don't flood our support or forum with requests, we are working on it 24/7 to get it resolved. Thank you.

Hot Tub Time Machine causes AnyDVD 6.6.8.0 to crash

I thought about this today and here's some various thoughts I had:

1) Some applications have CPU specific optimizations that are usually just a compiler switch. If that's the case here, it may be possible to make a "legacy support" compile of AnyDVD just by using a switch, although I'm probably wrong and there's more to it since the crash only happens on BD+ disc scans.

2) If you built your system in 1999 and gave it its final upgrade in 2001, imagine someone posting on a forum back in 2001 saying that they can't get an application to run on a computer they built in 1989 and did a final upgrade on in 1991. It's not the exact same in terms of technology, but it is the exact same in terms of time perspective. It's kinda hard to feel sorry for such an old crazy dude. :)

3) Just for fun I went to Costco.com and right on their front page they are advertising a Dell Inspiron 17 laptop with a Core i5 2.40 ghz processor, 4 gigs of ram, 1 gig graphics card, 500 gig hard drive, Blu-Ray, and 2 year warranty for $900, ships next business day. Just to show how cheap hardware is nowadays, you could buy this and be up and going with AnyDVD this week. Granted, $900 is a lot of money, but I can remember (which doesn't seem that long ago to me) when a Pentium 100 mhz 32 meg RAM system was $5,000 (seriously). To me that Costo laptop is a LOT of bang for the buck.

4) I do often see threads on various forums from people who just bought a computer or graphics card made within the last year or so and can't get it to work with a certain program due to it being "too new" as opposed to "too old," so it can go both ways. A lot of people keep old machines around because you can usually bet they're not going to have incompatible hardware for which support hasn't been written yet (and since it costs time and money to write in support it sometimes doesn't ever happen). A further reason I believe applications (like AnyDVD) should be able to run on the widest number of systems imagineable, while still being able to be speed tweaked for the latest hardware. Consider it Slysoft, not just for poor Pelvis! ;)
 
Pelvis Popcan said:
Holy cow, I think this guy wants the entire internet to be mainframe terminal text:

http://www.keithlynch.net/netvision.html

All computer games would have to be like Zork. :clap:
Click to expand...

I don't know if I'd go THAT far, but it's pretty likely Keith wouldn't mind if the whole Internet would be mainframe compatible. He wouldn't be able to post his photos though. :)

But if you read through that page, he is a big believer in compatibilty and adherence to standards, something I'm a believer in as well, but probably not to the extent he is (which is pretty extreme).
 
Looks like a nice notebook, but if I'm going to spend $900 on one I'd rather go to around $1500 for a more up to date one. If I'm going to use some old machine as a temporary solution I would just look to eBay for something not more than a couple hundred bucks. I've seen OEM P4 desktops on there for like $30. :p

I really appreciate the support but I think I really need to take responsiblity for taking such an unreal amount of time to upgrade my system. If SSE2 goes back to 2001, then AnyDVD will still run on 9 year old computers. I would love it if SlySoft added back legacy support, but I can't at all expect that for a problem that no one noticed in over a dozen past releases. Every computer user will eventually reach a point where they are forced to upgrade if they want to continue using the latest version of any given software; a decade is more than reasonable. The "other competing product" will buy me some time anyways, so I should be OK. :p

By the way, I'm not THAT old, nor am I THAT poor. :p
 
PIII / PII practicality

Here I am again, I don't know why exactly this bugged me so much... if this was CloneBD we were talking about it wouldn't faze me so much but AnyDVD being a sector copier / decrypter seems like it shouldn't flat out refuse to work and crash on a PIII! :)

I dusted off a Blu-Ray burner and hooked it up to one of my PIII's... a 1.2 ghz Tualatin machine.

I installed AnyDVD 6.6.2.0 and did a little testing. I put in Day the Earth Stood Still. BD+ removal took about 20 seconds. Region removal took an additional 20 or so. All in all around 40 seconds for BD+ and region crunching. Not too shabby at all!!! I was expecting it to take several minutes at least!!

I then tried ripping. The drive I was using is a 2x drive and it was able to work at full speed. Burning to a BD-RE also happened at full 2x speed.

I have no idea what the newer SSEC2 requirement in AnyDVD is for specifically, BUT if it's strictly for performance, I can't imagine it boosting performance that much on a recent multi core machine. I would be willing to bet it saves a few seconds if that. (That's of course if there are no other reasons for absolutely requiring SSEC2.)

I guess the main reason I took the time to do this and am posting now is to make sure that the developers know that if PIII or even PII support for AnyDVD HD is not fully supported because there is some question of "is it possible or even practical to use AnyDVD HD on such a machine to make a Blu-Ray backup," I believe the answer is a definitive yes. I would bet that even a PII 500 machine could do it at 1x speed. Less practical, but totally possible and not out of the range of being practical by a longshot!

Again I don't know why this bugged me so much and I apologize in advance if I'm annoying everyone (which I probably am)! :)
 
My God, what have I done! :eek:

That's very comparible to my experience. I make ISO's then burn to BD25 or BD50. It worked VERY well. I never had a single backup with an issue and I've had no issues at all with AnyDVD until the crash due to no SSEC2 support... very very stable even on that old machine.



MandyWine said:
if PIII or even PII support for AnyDVD HD is not fully supported because there is some question of "is it possible or even practical to use AnyDVD HD on such a machine to make a Blu-Ray backup,"
Click to expand...

I think the question is actually "If we start using SSEC2, what percentage of our customers will have issues," and the answer so far isn't 1 percent, it's 1 person. :eek:
 
Run AnyDVD in in virtual machine

To get around your problem, have you considered running Windows under a virtual machine? You can download and use VMware Player for free. I'm guessing that you can simulate a SSE2 processor, although I haven't looked into it (you might need VMware Workstation for this -- which you can evaluate for free, at least).

Mac users, such as myself, use VMware's Fusion product to run AnyDVD on a Windows VM. Works great!
 
Don't most Macs use intel processors now? So wouldn't it access the sse2 from that?
 
That's true. My machine does have an SSE2 processor. However, running a virtual machine that has different capabilities than your existing machine is one of the purposes of a virtual machine in the first place. If VMware can't do this, I'd be surprised.
 
No VMware allows you to use a different operating system, but it can still only use the features of the hardware that are available
 
VMWare doesn't do it. A SSE2 emulation layer might be possible, but someone would have to write one. There's really no motivation for anyone to do so, as the number of people wanting to use SSE2 specific features of applications on a PIII or lower is probably less than 10.

Someone did write a driver that intercepts invalid SSE instructions (such as SSE2 on a PIII) and then kills them, rather than emulate them. This allows some applications to run, but won't support anything the application does that needs to use SSE2.
 
Last edited:
Looking at the minimum system requirements as posted by DrinkLyeAndDie, and the additional commentary by Adbear
Adbear said:
Well as they state the minimum specs, and as PIII's never went higher than 1.4 and SSE2 started with the P4's it should be pretty much covered. At some point the customer does have to take some responsibility.
Click to expand...
my question is, did the product have these requirements in the first place, or have they been changed over time? And we are talking about ANYDVDHD, not just ANYDVD, right? If these are the original system requirements I don't see how anyone can expect the product to work on the PIII machine. If it happens to work, great, but there should be no expectation. If the system requirements have been changed, then I would have to think "legacy support" on an unexpired subscription would be an expected and required action. I also think the pop-up notification about your system being too old would be a nice touch. But again, if the system requirements haven't changed I don't think it should be expected. Conversely, if these are updated system requirements, the message should say something along the lines of
"Our program has failed to work on this system, please contact us so we may resolve this issue for you."​
 
If I had to take a wild stab in the dark on this foolish issue, and this is indeed a WILD stab in the dark, my guess would be that at some point SlySoft switched to compiling AnyDVD with visual studio 2010 which has a particularly nasty bug where the code generated for SSE doesn't work right on Athlon XP and P3 systems. It's generating the wrong code, basically. It's a confirmed bug in VS 2010. I'm only speculating here, and I really don't know for sure if that's the case. But that'd be my best guess.
 
It's really good to know the true reason behind SSE support absence, regardless of very few systems out there that are affected by it. At first I thought it was a speed-up optimization or similar and wondered how much SSE2 can contribute over the SSE. But it turns out to be a Micro$oft blooper.
And we have someone to blame.

From v6.6.8.1, AnyDVD notifies about absence of SSE2 support rather than crashing.
And here's one "happy" user's comment on that.
 
Woa woa woa woa. Please don't take my speculation as fact! :) I was offering a PLAUSIBLE reason for the issue, not a fact that that's the reason or the cause. :) I couldn't have been more clear about it being a guess and nothing more than speculation. :)
 
SamuriHL said:
Woa woa woa woa. Please don't take my speculation as fact! :) I was offering a PLAUSIBLE reason for the issue, not a fact that that's the reason or the cause. :) I couldn't have been more clear about it being a guess and nothing more than speculation. :)
Click to expand...

Yes, yes, you were perfectly clear about the speculation, but it indeed looks like very plausible explanation. But you posted "under my feet" so I combined my reply into single post and didn't read your words carefully enough. :eek:

I even confused "SSE2 vs SSE" for "SSE3 vs SSE2" - SSE2 being a big enhancement of SSE in contrast to SSE3 bringing much less to SSE2. So I should have wrote that "I wonder how much SSE3 can contribute over the SSE2".

There's SSE4, SSE5 spec yet to be implemented in the future (but broken by AMD into three subsets and already implemented) and then there's AVX "refinement" also "to be done"... blah, blah.
I guess I'll upgrade to SSE5 and AVX capable processor ASAP, not to be greeted by AnyDVD with something like "You need AVX capable processor", possibly due to Micro$oft compiler bug.

LOL (cannot put another smiley)
 
Last edited:
The speculation is incorrect. Peer was gracious enough to private message me some developer info on it, which he asked me not to share with anyone.

The bottom line is, AnyDVD needs SSE2, which means it can run on PC's which are at this point up to about 10 years old (Pentium 4 first came out in 11/2000).

Slysoft would have to spend at least a month or more to code SSE2 emulation into AnyDVD. That's too much time and work for the tiny number of people who want to back up Blu-Ray's on PIII's.
 
As I said, it was just speculation. At least we know it's not a compiler issue now.
 
And we also know AnyDVD didn't use SSE at all, and the use of SSE2 can only mean a speed improvement, therefore lower CPU usage/faster processing and decrypting.

Started as a speculation but ended as a fact - not bad at all. :clap:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top