RESOLVED: Reproducible freezing when playing many videos (Hardware Decode on)

[odaymansour]

Merry Christmas, I hope everyone is getting a good rest over the holidays.

I’m facing a consistently reproducible freeze in TD when playing a few video files at the same time (16 of them). The freeze doesn’t only happen with these 16 videos. I’m pulling randomly from a pool of ~2,000 videos and the freeze happens regardless.

I’ve attached a simplified .toe file that reproduces the crash. You might have to update a path in a Table DAT on the left-hand side of the sketch IF your installation of TD is in a different directory than mine.

Test case:

1. Start crash.toe
2. Play the sketch and watch 8 of the 16 Movie In TOPs load and start playing videos
3. Enable the left bank of 8 additional Movie In TOPs, making the total 16
   1. (I can get it to crash at a total of 12 videos playing on my side, but it might take a few more minutes)
4. Wait 1 minute for the freeze to happen

I get this error:

My setup:

• OS Name: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor
• Installed Physical Memory (RAM): 32.0 GB
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
• Driver Version: 32.0.15.9159
• GeForce Game Ready Driver: 591.59 (Released Thu Dec 18, 2025)
• TD Version: 2025.32050

I have a theory that I’m hitting some hardware decode limit imposed by the driver, as NVIDIA do this on their consumer cards. I don’t know how to tell for sure. Disabling Hardware Decode makes the issue go away, and that’s what I’ll be doing for this project.

crash.toe (6.5 KB)

Thank you.

[malcolm]

Hey, it’s possible you are running into this issue:

NVIDIA Studio Driver 577.00 crashing with 2025.30280

Hey, One issue we just discovered is that a hang can occur if more than 8 hardware video decoders are active. Since in 2025.30000 we’ve enabled hardware decoding by default (on the ‘Tune’ page of the Movie File In TOP), that may be what you are running into. Can you try turning that off on some nodes and see if that helps?

Do you have many Movie File In TOPs running in the system?

[odaymansour]

Hey, yes that looks exactly like the problem. It happens to me when I reach 12 hardware decoders. Disabling hardware decoding “fixes” it. Thank you!

[malcolm]

Thanks for the confirmation. In future builds we are forcing the hardware decode to only have 8 active at most, until we can find the root cause for this issue.