Troubleshooting

If you are experiencing an issue with OpenShot, such as a freeze, crash, or error message, there are many different techniques which can be useful for troubleshooting the issue.

Windows 11 Unresponsive

If you experience a freeze on Windows 11, this is a known issue with PyQt5 and Windows 11, related to the accessibility features in Qt. This is triggered by pressing Ctrl+C in OpenShot (only on Windows 11). OpenShot will become unresponsive and a memory leak is also present (i.e. the longer OpenShot is unresponsive, the larger your memory leak will become until OpenShot finally crashes or the user kills the process).

A simple work-around is to avoid Ctrl+C on Windows 11, and instead use the right-click Copy/Paste menus. Another work-around is to remap your “Copy” from Ctrl+C to something else, for example Alt+C. You can change your keyboard mappings in the OpenShot Preferences. See Keyboard.

Windows Debugging with GDB

If you are experiencing a crash or freeze with OpenShot in Windows 10/11, the following step by step instructions will help you determine the cause of the crash. These instructions will display a stack trace of OpenShot’s source code, at the location of the crash. This information can be extremely useful for our development team, and very useful to attach to bug reports (for a quicker resolution).

Install the Latest Daily Build

Before attaching a debugger, please download the latest version of OpenShot: https://www.openshot.org/download#daily. Install this version of OpenShot to the default location: C:\Program Files\OpenShot Video Editor\. For details instructions on debugging OpenShot on Windows, please see this wiki.

Install MSYS2

The Windows version of OpenShot is compiled using an environment called MSYS2. In order to attach the GDB debugger to our executable, openshot-qt.exe, you must first install MSYS2. This step is only required once.

Download & Install MSYS2: http://www.msys2.org/
Run MSYS2 MinGW x64 command prompt (for example: C:\msys64\msys2_shell.cmd -mingw64)
Update all packages (Copy/Paste the following command):
```
pacman -Syu
```

Install GDB debugger (Copy/Paste the following command):

pacman -S --needed --disable-download-timeout mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain

Launch OpenShot with GDB Debugger

Run MSYS2 MinGW x64 command prompt (for example: C:\msys64\msys2_shell.cmd -mingw64)

Update the PATH (Copy/Paste the following commands):

export PATH="/c/Program Files/OpenShot Video Editor/lib:$PATH"
export PATH="/c/Program Files/OpenShot Video Editor/lib/PyQt5:$PATH"

Load OpenShot into the GDB debugger (Copy/Paste the following commands):

cd "/c/Program Files/OpenShot Video Editor"/
gdb openshot-qt.exe

Launch OpenShot from GDB prompt (Copy/Paste the following command):

run --debug

Print Debugging Info

Once OpenShot has launched successfully with GDB attached, all you need to do is trigger a crash or freeze in OpenShot. When a crash occurs, switch back to the MSYS2 MinGW64 terminal and run one of the following commands (by typing it and pressing ENTER). Usually, the first command to enter is bt, which stands for backtrace. More commands are listed below.

(gdb) run            (launch openshot-qt.exe)
(gdb) CTRL + C       (to manually break out   OR   wait for a crash / segmentation fault)
(gdb) bt             (Print stack trace for the current thread #)
(gdb) info threads   (to view all threads, and what they are doing. Look for `__lll_lock_wait` for Mutex/deadlocks)
(gdb) thread 35      (Switch to thread number, for example thread 35)