UE4.13 Media Framework crashes

Hello,
Followed the docs to create a media player asset and put that on my mesh.
When I launch the uproject (in windows file explorer > right mouse > launch project) the media texture shows up most of the times but sometimes I get a crash with the following error when I debug in Visual Studio (see screenshot)

And indeed - I cannot find wmfmedia.pdb in the location UE4 expects it to be.
In fact : the only places where I have this pdb file is in 2 old directories where I built the engine from github

Any pointers to prevent this crash from happening ?

Thank you

Hey Sunchaser-

Can you link to the documentation you used when creating your asset? Additionally, can you provide the callstack and log files from the crash for additional information.

Thanks for replying.

Dont have a callstack. I just get an hourglass symbol inside of the oculus and on the desktop I get a little alert box stating “Unreal has crashed an needs to close” - thats it.

Log file generated in pastebin here:

Thank you for the log files. To help me reproduce the crash I would need to know what documentation you followed.

Hi Sunchaser, in the Media Player Editor, can you please copy/paste the contents of the Info tab?

Also, would you mind sharing the video with me - then I can try to play it on my machine and see what’s going on, thanks!

Sure.
Can you tell me what the correct encoding settings need to be? Cannot find this in the Docs, it just talks about mp4 and wmv to be the supported formats, but ofcourse there are many possible encoding formats.

Also - could you provide some insights as to what this error specifically means? Why is it looking for Wmfmedia.pdb and isn’t it logical that this file will never be found cause I cannot find it anywhere on my pc? (or is it loaded from somewhere else at runtime?)

Paste of Info tab. (sadly I cannot share the video at this moment - copyright issues - I hope you understand)

Player: WmfMedia
Forward Rates
Thinned: Not supported
Unthinned: Not supported
Reverse Rates
Thinned: Not supported
Unthinned: Not supported
Capabilities
Scrubbing: Yes
Seeking: No

Stream 0
Type: Audio
Codec: MPEG HEAAC
Protected: No
Channels: 2
Sample Rate: 44100 Hz
Bits Per Sample: 16

Stream 1
Type: Video
Codec: H264
Protected: No
Dimensions: 3840 x 2048
Frame Rate: 30.0064 fps

The streams in your video look OK. The only thing that stands out is the high resolution, but WMF should be able to handle up to 4096x2304. I’m afraid I won’t be able to tell you anything else without playing the video on my PC.

The .pdb is a so called program database file, which contains debug information for the WmfMedia.dll. You can find instructions on how to download them here: Can Epic release the PDB files for each official Editor build? - Platform & Builds - Epic Developer Community Forums - those files will allow you to show debug information in Visual Studio.

Another option would be to compile UE4 from the GitHub source code and debug the crash yourself in Visual Studio.

The log file that you attached is cut off, unfortunately, so it won’t tell us where the crash occured. The only relevant entry in the log is this:

Failed to set topology in media session (A stream descriptor was set on a
source stream node but it was not selected on the presentation descriptor.)

This used to happen prior to 4.13.1 if a video contained multiple video tracks or multiple audio tracks. Since this is not the case for your video, I have no idea what the problem is.

One more thing you could try is to run your video in 4.14.

so - if I understand correctly - just installing the PDB file will not prevent the crash from happening , it will just show a better crash log?

switching to 4.14 is not an option here.

just installing the PDB file will not prevent the crash from happening,
it will just show a better crash log?

That is correct. It would allow you to provide more details on what’s happening.

Again, if you could share the video, then I could also test it on my PC. Perhaps you can create a small test video using the process that also exhibits the issue.

Otherwise, your best option is to debug it yourself. Right now I don’t have enough information to work off of, sorry.

Hey Sunchaser-

We have not heard back from you in a few days, so we are marking this post as Resolved for tracking purposes. If you are still experiencing the issue you reported, please respond to this message with additional information and we will follow up. Let us know if you’re able to provide the specific video you’re having issues with to help investigate the issue.

Cheers