CNET TV player memory leak & other bugs...

Hi

http://cnettv.cnet.com/foursquare-amex-team-up/9742-1_53-50106907.html

Just start here and click the NEXT page button in the playlist. Click/repeat again say for another 10 or 20 times. See how far you get. Am trying to get to the earliest shows in 2009, 2008, etc.

Also monitor your memory of the web browser while you're doing it. You'll find IE, FF, Chrome all will crash.

The NEXT button works for me, and I have been successfully scrolling through the video page listing, and have reached 201-210 of 746 videos.

They all work as well. I am currently watching Loaded "The Sony PSP phone" from 8/12/2010.

So, the first problem you have, blank & inoperable listings, must be local, sorry. What I mean is, a problem with your system. The test here is to try this on another computer, to see for yourself. Either a relative or friend's system.

Possible causes range from problems with your system anyway, eg OS not performing properly, to malware infection either currently, or some past infection which, although cleared now, has left the system damaged, and finally to browser add-ons. I know you say you have tried 3 different browsers, but we often trace back such difficlties to bad add-ons.

I forgot to mention Flash. You say you have the latest version of Flash. Mine is 10.3.181.26. If yours is earlier then try updating it. If yours is the same, try uninstalling it and reinstalling it using Adobe's Flash Uninstaller at;
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html

Another trick with Flash is to disable hardware acceleration. Right click the play area, select Settings, and remove the tick for "Enable hardware acceleration".

Delete all locally stored Flash 'temporary internet files'. Right click the play area again, select "Global Settings", and browse the options to delete those files.

I do see Firefox's memory increase in the Task Manager but I see that as solely because I am attempting to scroll through so many files. I have two entries in the TM, Firefox.exe*32 for which memory increased from 250,000K to 375,000K, and "Plugin-container.exe*32" which increased from 150,000K to 665,000K. CNET cannot solve that because this is how Firefox works with memory. As soon as I exited out of the Loaded page, those figures reduced dramatically.

One final thing. If you want videos dating back to 2008 and 2009 I think you're going to struggle. At 10 videos per page you have over 700 videos to search. I don't see any quick way to do that, but I have asked Lee, the Forum Admin, to have a word with the team to see how you can quickly access the archives.

I hope that helps.

Mark

Visit http://cnettv.cnet.com/loaded/ and note the pagination. In short, whenever they post a new video, they also make a blog post that includes the video on that page. You can quickly jump through the posts using the page numbers, which enabled me to get to their first video, from 2008, in just two clicks.

As to memory, though, there is no simple solution - RAM usage increases with browser usage, and can be dramatic when viewing webpages with lots of multimedia content, especially when that content is streaming video. There's little CNET can do about that - responsibility largely falls on browser developers (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, etc), plugin developers (Microsoft, Adobe, etc.), and the like.

Hope this helps,
John

I was able to reproduce the "NaN" issue with using a combination of previous and next buttons - I've reported it and hope it's something they can easily fix.

Regards,
John

Cheers thanks! Didn't know about the blog pages. That'll help a bit.

But still am not doing much on the computer. This is from a clean boot up, I ensure all other programs are closed and killed in Task Manager to give me as much possible free memory. But I only have 2GB RAM and just paging through 29 pages on the playlist crashes Flash Player.... I've used many other Flash web apps without this happening...

I replicated this bug on my friends computer who has IE9. Starting from a recent Loaded episode:

http://cnettv.cnet.com/foursquare-amex-team-up/9742-1_53-50106907.html

- Click NEXT in the side-playlist for 29 times (waiting for the list to appear first before the next click).
- After 25 times I notice the iexplore.exe memory usage went over 1GB
- 29 times still only got as far as somewhere in 2010 episodes and then flash player crashed.

The memory leak usage seems to happen across all major browsers from IE, FF, Chrome. I believe it's a flash player issue than a browser issue, which means it could be something to do with the flash programming in the CNET TV player.

The NaN bug can only be replicated by going BACK & then NEXT in the playlist.

Sorry, when I said playlist blank & inoperable... that's only when you replicate the NaN bug (by going BACK then NEXT in the playlist.

About the flash player crashing due to insufficient memory, I only have 2GB RAM on Windows XP 32-bit. Ofcourse you can probably click more than 30 NEXT pages than me if you have eg. 4GB RAM, but that's no the point. The point is, just after 27 NEXT pages... I stop just to look at the Task Manager. What I see is iexplore.exe memory usage steadily increasing... and doesn't stop.... and am not even doing anything. It just keeps on increasing hence why it looks like memory leak.

Hey all,

Hey all,