For several months now I’ve had this error, which causes my server to randomly blue screen and restart. I don’t typically notice this though, as virtual machines running on top of the server are preset to auto boot once windows has restarted (thanks to VMWare workstation 8 shared VM feature). I’ve looked at this issue in the passed and presumed it must either be hardware related or a bad install of Windows server 2008 R2 (This also applies to Win 7).
I think I may have just gotten to the cause issue of it. If you’ve come across this page and you use a DLNA program called Serviio, keep reading, otherwise your issue could be unrelated (although as described below, it was a combination of serviio, java and ffmpeg).
I’d previously looked at the blue screen minidumps using some analyzer which didn’t seem to say more than the error was f4 caused by ntoskrnl.exe which didn’t leave me with much to try and figure out what really was causing it. A quick google on it will show the number of people having frustrating unexplained issues with it.
Something I should have done ages ago was simply to open the windows Event Viewer. Looking at logs around the time of crashes showed something quite interesting and unexpected:
Faulting application name: ffmpeg.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4ee7d185
Faulting module name: ffmpeg.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4ee7d185
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0071e4e3
Faulting process id: 0x10f0
Faulting application start time: 0x01cd8d892d613b00
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Serviio\lib\ffmpeg.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Serviio\lib\ffmpeg.exe
Report Id: 6c28bf8e-f97c-11e1-8d1f-940c6d82d8ea
A bit more googling on this, and hopefully I have a fix for the crashing. Time will tell, as the blue screen restarts are quite random (might go a day without it, or a week) and often when the server is idle and not having any major resources accessed.
Hopeful fix:
Installed latest Serviio (1.01)
Downloaded and installed offline version of Java x64 (forum suggestion) – uninstall any previous versions of Java you have installed first.
Manually downloaded latest ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/) and put in it C:\Program Files\Serviio\lib\
Update:
Well it’s only been a day since I wrote this post, but a bit more research into this has shown that for me at least, it is somehow Serviio related. Thanks to a brilliant forum post I found while trying to find a better BSoD dump analyser, I discovered http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=analyze. This website allows you to upload your BSoD minidump and will analyze it for you! Brilliant!
Example of one of my Minidumps here.
Update #2:
A month 1/2 now and no bluescreens! Issue for me = closed!
hi Mattie,
I know this is an old post, but I am getting this exact same BSOD with the current version of Serviio running on Win7Pro x64. I’m about to try your fixes and see how they go. Out of curiousity, did you happen to have a Brother printer at the time? (and/or have the Brother Control Centre installed?)
Interesting…I used to have my server also running as a print server with a Brother and Canon printer connected. I don’t think I had the Brother control software though, as I used the MS print server feature for doing all the printer stuff.
Try what I’ve suggested out, and chances are it probably will fix your problem. I haven’t had an issue since I originally wrote this post.
Let me know how you get on : )
hi Matt,
Thanks for your response.
I’ll tell you something interesting .. it is a friend’s PC that this is happening on. It’s a Dell PC. This reason he got this Dell PC is because his previous PC (a whitebox with almost totally different hardware) was experiencing the exact same problem! It had Serviio on it also. But considering not many people are reporting this error, it leads me to believe that the cause must be due to some type of commonality between the previous PC and the new Dell PC. The only components that are the same between the PCs are a 1TB hard disk, and a Brother MFC-825JW USB\network printer. I swapped out the 1TB disk with a new 2TB one. The crashes persisted. The culprit I’m suspecting now could be the driver of the Brother printer. It’s like there’s some conflict between Serviio/java and the Brother drivers. I’m curious what model of Brother printer you had?
Hi Nev,
Have you had a look in the Windows Event Viewer? If you’re having bluescreens, it should hopefully give you some more information in there.
In my case, as shown in the post, my issue was with Serviio and its’ use of FFmpeg, in combination with java. Personally I don’t believe my brother printer had anything to do with it. Regardless, the model I had was the HL-5240.
hi Mattie,
The Windows event logs show no faulting applications.
I have updated FFMpeg to the latest version. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try updating Java.
Thanks again.
I am getting BSOD crashes and do have a Brother printer. Nev, what finally worked for you?
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