To bug or not to bug ^^

To test i installed version Natron-RB-2.3.15 RC18 for Windows7. When executing the node READ, I get an error: "Error while creating node fr.inria.built-

in.Read: Could not find a decoder to read mkv file format". It is issued regardless of the file format that I want to Read: MKV, MOV …or even JPEGs.

However, the same version on Linux does not know such difficulties and easily copes with Reading such files.

RC18 has been tested on Windows 8.1 Pro, Windows 10.1903 and Windows 10.1909 Pro, I don’t have any file issues (local or through the network).

Note that I don’t test on Windows 7 anymore, but it should work as v8/10.

OK ! Thanks.
I understand.

Tested Natron on Windows 7, and yes there are issues.

IO.ofx will not load. I will take a look and see if this is a easy fix. This does not affect Windows 8 or 10.

It’s an issue with OIIO.

natron-oiio-win7

Did a quickfix for Windows7, download Natron-2.3.15RC-Win7-quickfix.zip (3.1 MB) and replace libOpenImageIO.dll on you Natron (2.3.15RC) installation.

Works on Windows 7 Pro in VBOX.

I have not had the time to test against Windows 8/10, when I get the time I will add a patch to OIIO and do a new build.

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On the other hand, win7 is eol, so maintaining compatibility with it is not high priority. What is the oiio patch, and did you submit it upstream?

OIIO now uses _create_locale, only available in Win8+. my patch against OIIO removes the use of _create_locale, not something to upstream at the moment.

mingw added support for this a while back (MinGW-w64 - for 32 and 64 bit Windows / [Mingw-w64-public] [PATCH] crt: Add compatibility wrappers for _create_locale and _free_locale in msvcrt.dll), I could try to add this, but unsure if this breaks anything else.

We still support old (EOL) versions of macOS and Linux, so Windows 7 should still be supported (within reason). I will do a test with a newer version of mingw and see what happens, if this creates more issues than it’s worth we just drop Windows 7 support in 2.3.15.

So what do you propose to use to enforce the C locale?

That specific change was introduced because OIIO was failing on some systems with non-C locales, especially those with a different decimal marker than “.”.

This bug affected Natron users, so it would be wise to not reintroduce it.

See More principled handling of string<->numeric conversions. by lgritz · Pull Request #1796 · AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenImageIO · GitHub

We still support older macOS versions because older mac hardware cannot run the newest versions. This is not true of Windows hardware: all hardware that supported Win7 also supports Win10. We especially don’t want to introduce bugs in the Win builds.

Windows 7 System Requirements:

  • 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor.
  • 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
  • 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
  • DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver.

Windows 10 system requirements:

  • A 1-gigahertz (GHz) processor.
  • 1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM for 32-bit Windows, or 2 GB for 64-bit.
  • 32 GB of hard disk space.
  • A graphics card that supports DirectX 9 or later, with a WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) driver.
  • A display with a resolution of at least 800×600 pixels.

The only different is it requires 32GB disk space.

Concerning Linux, we support CentOS6, which is not EOL (maintained until Nov. 30 2020).

setlocale should work (that’s what I tested with). Anyway, this was just for testing and not something I will use.

I did try to upgrade mingw on a different installation and it did break other packages, so I will not proceed with that solution.

With that conclusion I say we just drop Windows 7 from supported platforms for the binary builds.

You forget about the drivers, if the hardware does not have drivers for Windows 10 you are out of luck… Not so easy :wink:

Great. I downloaded and replaced libOpenImageIO.dll .
Now everything works.
Thank you that gave Natron (2.3.15RC) to be on the Windows 7.

Any chance of a new ‘quick fix’ for Win 7? The one you’ve posted here doesn’t work for me :frowning:
I am very very sad about dropping Win 7 support.
I have NO IDEA how to build/compile. Would doing that even BE a solution to this issue?
Thanks.

I can upload a new dll this week.

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I will love you FOREVER!! :smiley:
I’m also considering attempting to compile it myself, using mingw … As you earlier said that mingw includes the missing function. Is that still a working option?
I’ve never compiled anything under Windows, and only successfully compiled a couple things under Linux that had pretty much no dependencies.

I made an Pixls.us account, just to thank you for your efforts to keeping Natron alive on Win7.

I’m sure there are many others like me and artao5 who do not like Win10 for its spyware capabilities but are also unable to switch over to Linux in the near future. In my case its because of a project that needs to wrap before I can switch, but in the meanwhile, I really appreciate you helping keep Natron alive for Win7 users.

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Sorry for the delay (it’s suddenly a new week :stuck_out_tongue: (and that’s soon over) , been working too much lately ), I will try to make a new dll when I get home from work today.

Note that I will only do this for the duration of 2.3.x.

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Natron-2.3.15-Win7-quickfix1.zip (3.2 MB)

Completely untested as I don’t have Windows 7 available anymore, but I did use the same patch as last time, so it should work (in theory :wink: ). Remember to clear the plugin cache in Natron or else the IO plugins might not load. Also remember to set your locale accordingly, and as a final note: this is unofficial and unsupported.

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Thank you once again for taking the time to do this.

I cleared the plugin cache as you suggested and replaced the old dll and Natron fired up just fine. Thank you!

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YES!! It works.
You are like unto a god. I thank you so so much. :smiley: