Image scaling related crashes on 1080p devices #wpdev

Back in March one of the 1Shot camera app users emailed me stating that the app crashes when using he uses digital zoom on Lumia 1520. I couldn’t reproduce the issue on my 1020. I then borrowed a friend’s 1520 and hmm sure I could reproduce it but I couldn’t catch the exception.

So we left it at that.. fast forward on Friday I get a mail back from chap in question and he states that he’s running latest greatest version of preview and the freaky crash is still happening. Luckily I have the 1520 at my desk and decided to put it to good use over the weekend.

So I put VS configuration in Debug mode and I set VS to catch all thrown exceptions. Run app and swipe left right and top bottom and every so often the app crashes.. no exception being caught.. the app just disappears and we are back to home screen. The only clue was the output of debug mode.. The program ‘[4880] AgHost.exe’ has exited with code -1073741819 (0xc0000005) ‘Access violation’.

The sad reality, the debug output is littered with messages starting ‘AgHost.exe’ (CoreCLR: Silverlight AppDomain): A quick check on the net showed that AgHost.exe is used to manage access through identity verification.. great. The error code wasn’t particularly useful either.

In this particular case, the error only occurred when zooming in. My implementation of digital zoom was scaling the preview image for the live view. The only action associated with crash was zooming in and out. As it happens, I detect manipulation delta and compute scale..

private void LivePreviewTapTarget_ManipulationDelta(object sender, System.Windows.Input.ManipulationDeltaEventArgs e)
{
    if (!this.viewModel.CaptureInitiated && AppSettings.InternalAppSettings.DragZoom)
    {
        SetDragToScale(e.CumulativeManipulation.Translation);
        e.Handled = true;
    }
}

void SetDragToScale(System.Windows.Point pScale)
{
    double x = Math.Abs(pScale.X);
    double y = Math.Abs(pScale.Y);

    double manipulation = x > y ? pScale.X : pScale.Y;

    bool zoomOut = manipulation >= 0 ? false : true;

    double scale = (this.viewModel.HasHighResolutionCamera ? 0.01 : 0.005) * Math.Sqrt(Math.Pow(x, 2) + Math.Pow(y, 2));

    if (zoomOut)
        this.viewModel.ViewScale = initialScale + scale;
    else
        this.viewModel.ViewScale = initialScale - scale;

    System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("zoomout {0}, scale {1}", zoomOut, scale);
}

My initial thought was that it being a newer SoC, the Xaml Renderer was somehow being proactive somewhere and getting itself in a mess.

Test 1: show less frames and show larger jumps so there is less rendering. For High Res camera I used constant of 0.01.. increase it to 0.05.

The resultant build crashed very very fast. hardly took a swipe or two to head back to home screen.

So I wanted to try the reverse but by laptop decided to shutdown and I was too knackered to continue yesterday.
Earlier today I had a chat with Bill Reiss.. he mentioned that he had some problems with 1520 too and that it had something to do with how large the image becomes on 1080p screen.

So I decided to continue where I left yesterday but with a reduction only for 1080p devices.
Test 2: reduce the multiplication constant to 0.0015 if a 1080p device is detected.
Result: Significant reduction in crashes.. I can still get it to crash but not that often. Here is the changed version

int DeviceScaleFactor = -1;
private void GetScaleFactor()
{
    object physicalScreenResolutionObject;

    if (DeviceExtendedProperties.TryGetValue("PhysicalScreenResolution", out physicalScreenResolutionObject))
    {
        var physicalScreenResolution = (Size)physicalScreenResolutionObject;

        DeviceScaleFactor = (int)(physicalScreenResolution.Width / 4.8);
    }
    else
    {
        DeviceScaleFactor = Application.Current.Host.Content.ScaleFactor;
    }
}

void SetDragToScale(System.Windows.Point pScale)
{
    double x = Math.Abs(pScale.X);
    double y = Math.Abs(pScale.Y);

    double manipulation = x > y ? pScale.X : pScale.Y;

    bool zoomOut = manipulation >= 0 ? false : true;

    if (this.DeviceScaleFactor == -1)
    {
        this.GetScaleFactor();
    }

    double scale = (this.viewModel.HasHighResolutionCamera ? 0.01 : 0.005) * Math.Sqrt(Math.Pow(x, 2) + Math.Pow(y, 2));

    if (DeviceScaleFactor == 225)
    {
        scale = 0.0015 * Math.Sqrt(Math.Pow(x, 2) + Math.Pow(y, 2));
    }

    if (zoomOut)
        this.viewModel.ViewScale = initialScale + scale;
    else
        this.viewModel.ViewScale = initialScale - scale;

    System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("zoomout {0}, scale {1}", zoomOut, scale);
}

if the Device scale factor is 225, its a 1080p device and one should exercise caution.

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