VLC dying when called from inside Java - java

I'm having a problem that, at this moment, I don't even know how to investigate properly. Any recommendations on how I can get more information are welcome and appreciated.
My company sells a product with a WinXP PC at its core. One of the product's tasks is being able to start a video player on demand -- VLC, in this case. (To be specific, VLC 0.8.6d; it's several years out of date, but upgrading is problematic for a few reasons.) The application responsible for starting the player and performing many, many other tasks is written in Java.
I have a test rig sitting next to my desk. It used to work just fine. But for some reason, it now gives a "Send Error Report" window when the Java app tries to start VLC: "VLC media player has encountered a problem and needs to close...." You know the one.
Clearly, I've done something that buggered things up. Problem is, I know neither what it could be nor how I would go about fixing it.
Stuff I know:
It's not a code bug. I run the same software on my development desktop machine, and it doesn't have this issue.
It's not the VLC install, nor is it a malformed video file. When I capture the command used to start it from Java and manually enter that command from a "cmd" window, it works fine.
It's not that sneaky bastich bug where Java punishes you if you don't manually drain STDERR and STDOUT when making a system call. I've got that covered.
I'm not getting any error messages or output when it fails; it just fails and gives me that pop-up window.
I'm stumped. Recommendations for either what it could be or how I can figure out what it is are very welcome.

Well, I’m not familiar with java and VLC, but I would do the following things:
Check that you have identical java virtual machines in both of your desktops. Just in case…
Check the process’s environment variables. They depend on parent process. Maybe VLC uses some of them.
Try to debug crashing with native debugger like WinDbg. Perhaps the call stack will give you more ideas.
Good luck!

My suggestions:
Create a simple java app that just launches VLC
Use your app to launch a simple command line windows program
Use your app to launch a complex program
Check to see if there is a memory constraint issue. Is VLC getting too little memory to run?
This really sounds like a memory/environment issue.

A number of things I would try
Make Sure both test and development machines are identical in every respect, the operating syste(if possible installed from same OS Disk), same JVM version, same memory allocation to JVM (you know those -X-ms stuffs). My fear is not with Java/JVM per se, it is with windows.
Make sure you can lunch for example Notepad from a Java app, and then something like Windows Media Player or MS Word.
Try and launch other versions of VLC to see if it is a VLC version problem.
Finally try and wipe the test box and re-install it(with Windows, you can never tell, a fresh installation might just do it!!)

Related

Runnable .jar file not executed when double clicking

For quite some time I have encountered this issue that when doubleclicking a runnable .jar file it won't execute. Today I thought I'd have a look into solving this issue and read a bit through various SO articles regarding this topic.
First of all I have to say the following:
The problem occurs on my company's notebook running WIN 8 as well as on
my private WIN 10 desktop
I'm pretty sure about 1.5 - 2 years ago on the laptop doubleclicking worked
On the desktop however even directly after installation (which was in October last year) doubleclicking didn't work and it might be that I even already tried fixing the issue by reinstalling the JRE
As opposed to many situations described in various posts I can properly run the applications by calling "java -jar application.jar" in cmd but doubleclicking AS WELL AS trying to "open with" Java SE platform binary results in nothing happening
As suggested by several posts I tried running Jarfix however now the behaviour is as follows:
I had written a client-server application for my bachelor thesis which worked perfectly fine, I actually ran the application yesterday through cmd. After using Jarfix I'm now able to start the server by doubleclicking whereas the client side won't do anything when doubleclicked. I already checked for the correct filetype association as described in this post and everything looks correct.
Also I of course checked this with different programs as well and not only with my own applications. The same issue also appears for example (on my WIN 10 desktop) when trying to run Life in the Woods (for those not knowing it, it's a quite popular Minecraft mod pack) whereas it worked perfectly fine on my previous WIN 10 desktop when doubleclicking.
The problem that I have with this issue is not that I'd not be able to bypass it by running cmd commands but on the one hand it's simply annoying to always cd to the desired location and run this command and on the other hand it's simply something that has to definitely work after installing a JRE. It doesn't make any sense that for most people it works and for some few people random stuff happens - all more or less under the same conditions, that's not how any kind of software should behave.
I'd be really happy if anyone could help me solving this or point me towards anything I might have overlooked and forgot to check.
EDIT:
As pointed out by #VGR file operations using relative paths might be the reason for the problem hence below the two cases where file operations are being used:
Server-side:
File file = new File("C:/Util/authHashes.lvs");
Client-side:
systemProperties.put("javax.net.ssl.keyStore", "C:/Util/auth/labkey.jks");
systemProperties.put("javax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword", "password");
systemProperties.put("javax.net.ssl.trustStore", "C:/Util/auth/labtrust.jks");
What is weird is that both classes use absolute paths but the server starts when doubleclicking while the client does not. If both use the same kind of path shouldn't they both behave exactly the same?

Visual Studio Code - lagging when typing

I have just installed Visual Studio Code together with the Java Extension Pack. However, when I opened my first file and started typing, the text I type appears after a delay - reaching up even one second.
I have a hunch that it might be due to the number of processes going behind the editor, like real-time syntax checking, autocompletion, code hints et cetera. Perhaps the laptop I am working at simply cannot handle that much. These are the parameters of my current machine:
Processor: Intel(R) Caleron(R) CPU N3350 (1.10 GHz)
RAM: 4 GB
I have another hunch that it may be due to the processor.
So, are there a ways to switch off these facilities like real-time error-checking? If not, what other IDEs for Java could you reccomend? (Apart from Eclipse)
Had the same problem using Visual Studio Code while using Android Studio along with an Android Simulator in the background, and I run 8GB RAM and a CPU of 3.2GHz but when I returned to Notepad++ (I know its suicidal), to check if it is my problem or because of the IDEs, I typed in real time.
It is due to your processor as Visual Studio Code is not really recommended for "slow" CPUs. Personally I like it, although an IDE in the likes of Vim might suit you better.
Here is a link that might give some more hints:
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/38409
The easiest solution I found was to download and install Visual Studio Code Insiders. It's nearly identical except that it's known to lag less. Installing this will also clear any extensions or preferences you have enabled which might be causing the lag:
https://code.visualstudio.com/insiders/
You may also need to run it from the command line with the --disable-gpu flag
code-insiders --disable-gpu
or
/Applications/Visual\ Studio\ Code\ -\ Insiders.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron --disable-gpu
depending on your OS
Try the following steps:
Disable any unnecessary extensions.
Update to the stable version.
If this still hasn't worked, try reinstalling your Visual Studio Code instance.
Same for me, I often let the computer sleep instead of turn off and kill all processes so it was normal for me that the VS was open for a few days, the solution was to close visual studio and reopen it.
maybe its the computer performance issue. i am using a laptop.
yesterday i uninstall large program (MS SQl server)
now typing speed back to normal.
I've now had this problem a number of times. As a matter of fact I just had it right now.
What solves it for me is to
Close VS code
Unpin it from my taskbar
Pin it back
It works well after that.
Closing and reopening VS Code has never worked for me
Please disable Spring Boot Tools from Pivotal!!!
This extension doesn't work well with other Java extesions.(ie. Extesion pack for Java and Language support for Java)
After disabling it, I've seen significant speed increase with Intellisense, and CPU load reduced as a result. Please get rid of the thing!!!

Differences in execution behavior of Java program

I wrote a java program, which manipulates Word documents (docx) with Apache POI. It runs fine within Eclipse, and it runs fine as a runnable JAR on my computer (Windows 10).
I copied that JAR to another computer, and it is starting up normally. The GUI behaves like expected.
The problem is the Word document I write out (docx).
I am performing two types of changes. The first one is the addition of new paragraphs or concatenation of content to the runs. If I stay with this, the document gets written into the file system correctly. The second type is the simple replacement of content within the runs (changes of words and some grammatical changes). I would see that part as the "simpler" one, but if I stay with this or if I combine both change types, no document is written out at all. It does look like there is a bug, but there isn't one because it worked fine on my system.
I wrote myself a function to write out an error log (txt) to get information about that issue. This one worked on both systems. But the log didn't get any information, why the document was not written out.
I suppose there are some Windows security settings which interfer with my program or something like that. The computer that does not like to run my program has Win 7 installed on it, and there are some security domain settings, which affect all other computers in the local network.
Does anyone experienced something similar yet? Any suggestions what to check? Suggestions how to find out if an error happened are appreciated as well.
OK, the problem got solved by simply updating the Java version. I saw that update icon in the system tray, which didn't open update the update dialog. So I wanted to update the Java-version at least.
When I wanted to de-install the current Java version first, I noticed that the Win7-machine hadn't a Java-update for three years now. It was just installed in 2014. As soon as the recent version was installed, everything worked like expected again.
The strange behavior that some parts of my program worked and some not, confused me. I hoped that the Java update would fix this, but I doubted that. I didn't knew that old versions make programs run unpredictably.

Why Java Applet working only on my computer, but not on the others?

I just wonder something about java applet with awt. I quite disappointed with this problem and want to throw it away sometimes. Below are my descriptions:
I already created one application using java applet with awt controls on my own computer, let's say computerA using Window 7 32bit Operating System. To up and running this application, I update java version to the latest one.
Application is working fine with computerA. However, this application also need to run on the others as well. As my own situation, I run with another computer, let's say computerB using Window 7 64bits Operation System. I knew that the application created with 32bits java version, thus I decided to install this java version on computerB. However, when I run the application it can only display interface on browswer, but some of its function did not work.
Yet I didn't throw it away, I decided to configure in the last computer, let's say computerC. This computer use Window 8 32bits Operating System. I did configure as I did with computerA and computerB. The result is still exact as computerB.
I also checked up this solution on here, but it is not fit my problem.
Here are my questions:
What is the exact problem on here?
Where does the problem come from?
Is it solvable?
How can I solve this kind of problem? Any helps?
Update:
PostgreSQL Database also install in other local computers as well.
I noticed that If I convert my code into eclipse project, it worked fine. No problem at all.
Thanks in Advance.

Java IDE for working over Remote Desktop

I have recently found out that anything Swing(NetBeans, IDEA) is excruciatingly slow to paint the UI over Remote Desktop(RDP).
Can you guys give me any suggestion for something that will work properly over RDP?
Actually, contrary to everything I've seen - mostly the "Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true", which is mentioned in a number of places, it is actually setting it to false that fixed the drawing issues(for me at least). Go figure.
RDP is optimized for native Windows apps and, regrettably, newer versions of RCP (like Vista/Win7's default RDP) is even more hostile to non-native apps than older (XP/Server 2003) versions. Here's a good link:
http://devnet.jetbrains.net/thread/280673
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4204845
One workaround is to get a screaming fast CPU/graphics board, tons and tons of memory and a super high-speed network connection :)
Another is to:
Select "32-bit true color" in your Terminal Services settings
Select "Modem"
Reduce screen resolution (heck, use 1024x768 if possible)
Here are some additional tips:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/04/remote-desktop-tips-and-tricks.html
Try setting "Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true"
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1129187.html
http://www.mindfiresolutions.com/Solving-DIRECT-DRAW-ddraw-problems-in-Java-Swing-730.php
I am launching a java swing application from Linux, and display it as a Windows frame thanks to MobaXterm.
If you haven't done it already, please have a look at the following documentation :
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/2d/flags.html
Using -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true did not fixed my issue, but setting xrender to true did.
So here's the code I used on Linux :
export _JAVA_OPTIONS='-Dsun.java2d.xrender=true'
java -jar my_java_application.jar
Maybe it's not only Swing that paints slow over Remote Desktop. However, Eclipse is based on SWT, based on native widgets, so it is not Swing.
You should give JavaWIDE a try. It is an IDE designed for access to a JDK without it installed on a system, with a built-in storage system so you just need access to the internet. It's not exactly a program for accessing everything on the computer but it will do a good job with your programming. It may take a while however, as the compiling is done on a separate server.

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