We're getting this error at least once a service:

Unable to use fill type: Video File. Reason: An internal application error has occurred. Contact technical support if this problem persists

All our drivers and patches are up to date. Brand new machine with an nVidea GeForce RTX  4060, Intel Core i9-14900 processor and 32GB of RAM

Display settings are 1920x1080 with 100% scale

We're using MP4 versions of Shift Worship videos, usually the HD resolution. Latest issues are with https://shiftworship.com/collections/at-the-cross/

Videos usually show the second time we try to launch the song. but we get that disruptive black screen and have to back to the previous song and then forward again.

This has been happening for a while on our old machine, so we chalked it up to that. But like I said this is a new machine.

Is there anything I can do to trap these errors to help you debug them?

Thanks.

I just restored the program to my laptop with similar specs at home and don't have the problems to the same extent. So I'm not sure what's going on. Any ideas on how to troubleshoot this would be greatly appreciated.

We've had the same problem for a long time. Most of the time it works if I simply go back one step and then proceed. Sometimes it works better to mouse-click to advance, sometimes the "+" key works better. For a while I had it fairly consistently not showing the background for the sermon title slide (not good!), but I found that if I proceeded to the sermon title from a motion slide (generic clouds) it usually worked OK. Now I have found that proceeding from the last song to the benediction slide via the "+" key will often not show the slide show background. Buggy program and trying to find out what's going wrong takes more time than I want to spend.

Joel, you and I must be the last of the "old-timers" - I started with SSP in 1995!

Same issue here - I've just learned to live with it. 

Sometimes it gets unbearable and I switch to a still image background. When we get a new video background I always save a still image so I have it on hand as a fallback. 

 Mark - another old timer :)

We have experienced that each version since about 8.0 is less robust than the one before. We routinely edit two identical copies of slideshows and programs  because

we have often lost an hour or so of editing due to a crash.  If we're lucky, the crash won't do much harm, but sometimes it essentially wipes out the program or show. We

always keep the task manager visible so that we can shut down if the memory usage gets close to 20% of the total. Every program edit on our projection PC increases

the memory usage by about 20 Mb which is accumulated until a restart. Some backgrounds (mostly videos) simply won't work - we use mp4's mostly.  Some of the exotic

entrance effects (e.g., devaporize-motion, materialize-warp-in, etc.) will often cause a crash back to MS desktop. Pity - a beautiful program... when it works!

We've lived with this for quite a while, but since moving to the new Windows 11 machine, it's become much worse. I don't like the "flash to black" where I have to back up and try again. But now, SSP is sometimes locking up and we have to "x" out of it and restart. I'm going to contact tech support with this one.

I'm guessing that none of these problems have been solved at this time since there have been no responses for a month.

So, here's what's happened since I last posted.

1) We were getting so many failures with video backgrounds that we switched to stills for 3-4 weeks.

2) I finally opened a problem with support. They were unable to recreate the problem with the programs I sent them, so we arranged a remote session with our computer.

3) We got a power surge at the church that fried one of my monitors. (I discovered that right before the support call was about to start!). When I got things set back up, all the Windows 11 display settings had been reset to Windows default settings. I had to reset them all to work with SSP on our set up.

4) I was on the phone with support for 1.5 hours constantly playing songs with video backgrounds, jumping from program to program so we'd get a real variety of videos. We only got the error once. We were running a trace, so I sent that to them, and they are taking a look at it. But it only failed once in 1.5 hours.

5) We left the trace software on our machine so that if the issue0 starts occurring again, I can run the trace right away and hopefully reproduce it. They do NOT recommend running the trace all the time, especially during service.

6) Last week, I set up the program with new video backgrounds, working on it for about an hour, with no occurrences. And the morning service also ran without incident.

So, I don't know if a Windows 11 update came down and straightened something out or what. OR if letting it rest without video backgrounds for a few weeks allowed it to rest. (That can't be it, right? I'm sure replacing the fried monitor with a newer monitor (same resolution) didn't have a thing to do with this. As a retired PC support specialist, I get nervous when things start working without explanation.