Silent errors

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I'm working on an app which uses a 3rd party library for producing SWF and FLV files. For some reason the trial worked perfectly but when I switched my app to the full version there was no audio output.

We'd been looking at this problem for a while, emailing support etc, but just couldn't see what was wrong. It wasn't until I went back to my proof of concept app and ran it that we realised the full version did produce audio, it was just my main app that wouldn't work properly. Then I spotted the error...

var compressor = new TVE4();
compressor.LoadSettings(SettingsPath);
compressor.SetOutputFile(outputFileName);
compressor.EncodeSequenceAudio(Composition.EffectiveProductionAudioFileName);
compressor.Key1 = 12345;
compressor.Key2 = 54321;
(loop to encode frames)


Do you see the error? It was only as I switched between the proof of concept code and my app code in the IDE that I noticed the two following lines moving up and down...

compressor.Key1 = 12345;
compressor.Key2 = 54321;
Once I spotted it the problem was obvious! If I don't set my license key before encoding anything (including audio) it is not going to work. Moving the key up a couple of lines fixed the problem. It was a simple absent minded mistake to have made, but why did it take over a day to solve?

There were so many factors involved. We aren't using the "full edition" of the tool we are using a feature restricted version so we thought it might be that for a while. Then we thought it might be our settings files. Then their support department kept talking about missing codecs (which made no sense to be honest.) Then there was the fact that in the app it runs in a thread. All sorts of variables that seemed much more likely than a simple 2 line coding error.

The thing is, the EncodeSequenceAudio method returns a bool to indicate success or failure. I hadn't even spotted this. I am so accustomed to experiencing exceptions that I didn't even think to expect a boolean return type. In addition to this the examples that ship with the product don't check for a result either.

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