The Patriot Blu-ray from 4K package crashes AnyDVD

[mbarnstijn]

The Blu-ray disc that's part of the 4K package (Amazon.ca UPC 043396539174, ASIN: B07BF5TBPN) is silently crashing AnyDVD, with no crash log produced, under specific circumstances.

I've got pretty normal settings, mostly the defaults, with Remove Blu-ray Region Code set to Automatic most of the time. I also normally have the status window up before I insert a disc, so I can see what's happening when a disc is scanned.

When AnyDVD popped up and asked for the region on this disc the first time I put it in my system, I responded with 'Region A', because that pop-up is my signal that AnyDVD can't figure out the region by itself. I assume then that the disc is not region free, and select the region that's on the back cover of the case or the region from which it was purchased.

Imagine my surprise when AnyDVD continued decoding briefly (a few head motion sounds from the drive), and then the status window vanished. The 'unmasked' fox icon was still showing in the system tray, and when I brushed the mouse pointer over it, it also vanished.

It took me a while, but, after rebooting, uninstalling DeUHD, rebooting, power cycling everything (all of which was unnecessary) I discovered that if I set Remove Blu-ray Region Code to 'Always ask ...' and responded with 'Disc is region free' that AnyDVD did NOT crash silently, and DID decode the disc.

I've attached the log.

@James, @Pete, what do you think could possibly be happening here? Do I have something weird installed on my system that's interfering, or is this really a bug?

Cheers,

--michael

 

[Pete]

Do I have something weird installed on my system that's interfering, or is this really a bug?

Pretty sure, it's a bug.
I just don't know how to find it without a crash dump file.
I'm assuming, that AnyDVD is eating memory fast at some point (e.g. some recursive function endlessly calling itself) until memory is entirely used up, so that AnyDVD can't even create a dump file any more. (You might see memory usage climbing in the task manager).

Reproducing it here would be the best option, but it seems, that this disc is not from a country we have access to.

 

[mbarnstijn]

@Pete, I'm going to make an educated guess that the problem lies in the interpretation of a very small set of files both in number and content. That's my conclusion because there's only a very brief amount of drive activity, immediately after telling AnyDVD that the region is 'A', before AnyDVD vanishes. It might not be difficult to get that information to you for investigation. Let me know what you might need and how it can be communicated.

 

[mbarnstijn]

Now THAT'S interesting.

I set AnyDVD to scan my Virtual CloneDrive. I set region removal to 'Always Ask'. I mount the non-protected image of The Patriot's blu-ray, which I made by telling AnyDVD that the disc was region-free.

AnyDVD pops up the 'Blu-ray Disc Region' panel and I choose 'Region A'.

AnyDVD crashes silently.

--michael

 

[mbarnstijn]

@Pete

Ok, I did some experiments by unpacking the non-protected image to a folder (without AnyDVD running), then rebuilding a sequence of ISOs with some of the STREAM files missing. By binary search (there are 52 stream files, and I assumed the main movie wasn't the problem, this only took 5 steps) I was able to find the single m2ts file that was causing AnyDVD to crash in the process described in my previous post.

It's 00001.m2ts, a file that's 3.2MB in size. Apparently something in this file is lethal to the current version of AnyDVD when it's scanned. The ISO that can be mounted and scanned by AnyDVD to replicate this behaviour is 16MB in size, and in RAR format is 5MB. PM me for details.

--michael

 

[James]

Can you please try AnyDVD 8.3.8.1? It should fix this issue.

 

[mbarnstijn]

Yes, thanks, that did fix the issue. Speedy service, great job!