Application seems to load some videos indefinitely

[Miosp]

Describe the bug Some video files will load just fine, but some will take incredibly long time to load (longer than I had the patience to wait). While doing the load the progress animation is played, but nothing happens.

How To Reproduce

1. Find a video, which makes this happen
2. Open the video with Screenbox

Expected behavior Ideally, the video would play immediately.

Environment

• OS: Windows 11 24H2
• Device: PC (Ryzen 7 5800X, nVidia RTX 3080, 32GB RAM)
• App Version: 0.16.0.0 (from MS store)

Additional context If you were to tell me how can I get you some more logs / diagnostic info, I can do that.

In the task manager I can see that the application consistently uses the same amount of CPU all the time (on my machine ~9%) and the RAM usage steadily rises at a rate of ~0.2MB/s.

I checked with Windows' built-in video player and it works well with my video file.

When I check the properties inside the app, while it loads the video, I can see that some of the properties are loaded (like the video resolution), but others are not - audio bitrate is at 0kbps (mediainfo shows 391kbps).

What is interesting is that if I extract just the audio or just the video, it plays without any troubles, but the original file does not do that.

[dosubot[bot]]

There are a few reports of similar issues where some videos load indefinitely in Screenbox but play fine in other players. In some cases, users resolved it by updating their .NET runtime and restarting their PC, or by reverting to a previous stable version, though the maintainer noted that .NET runtime changes shouldn't affect Screenbox since it's compiled to .NET Native (example). No recent fixes or documentation address this directly.

Screenbox uses Sentry for error tracking, so if you reproduce the issue while connected to the internet, any unhandled exceptions should be reported automatically. However, there isn't a built-in way to access detailed logs from the UI.

To help narrow this down, could you share details about the problematic video files (format, codec, resolution, and whether the issue happens with other files of the same type)? If you notice a crash or error, note the date and time—it can help correlate with backend logs. If you’re able to share a sample file that triggers the problem, that could also help with diagnosis.

Screenbox 0.16.0.0 uses LibVLC.UWP 3.0.21-2505100334 and LibVLCSharp 3.7.0. There are no known issues with these versions regarding video loading or codec compatibility in the public documentation for the underlying libraries.

Let me know if you can provide more details or files, and I can suggest further steps!

To reply, just mention @dosu.

---

^{How did I do? Good | Irrelevant | Incorrect | Verbose | Hallucination | Report 🐛 | Other}   

[United600]

Probably #540 related. Debugging has been extremely hard due to its randomness. For the time being, you can revert to an earlier version or perform a quick app reset (open the start menu, right-click on the app and choose 'App settings') anytime a video stops loading, that has temporarily resolved the issue for me.