Blackmagic Forum

Hi reader,

I'm writing this because I've now seen two pc's blue screen. These computers have been running fine up to the point of updating the switcher program to 8.6. I'm not saying that the software is to blame, yet.

I would therefore like to know if anyone else has experienced BSOD after updating.

TIA

I have installed the original 8.6 release on 5 Windows 10 PC's (some on Insiders build 21322.1000, others on 1908 and 20H2 or whatever it is) and not a single issue.
Apparently there was an update to the download with out a version change and I tried that on one machine also without any issue.

I'm having the same issues. I have it tracked down to the switchers.sys drivers.

I can provide the dumps to the devs if needed.

I've also just experienced this problem.

Busy with a live stream event and it crashed mid stream.

Also running update 8.6

Same BSOD errors on two different laptops, an HP Pavillion, and a Toshiba. Horiible when BSOD kills your PC during a live production......

I have this issue.

Lots of machines crashing to blue screen of death.

Showing switcher. Sys. As error.

A serious threat to our live events where we are running 6 Atem Minis off Zoom laptops!!!


Please help BM!!!

elchicodebarba wrote:I'm having the same issues. I have it tracked down to the switchers.sys drivers.

I can provide the dumps to the devs if needed.

this is the driver for the USB control

SydneySoundAVI wrote:I have this issue.

Lots of machines crashing to blue screen of death.

Showing switcher. Sys. As error.

A serious threat to our live events where we are running 6 Atem Minis off Zoom laptops!!!


Please help BM!!!

have you tried downgrading to an older version ?

Also having similar BSOD / windows crashing issues with version 8.6 and above (and still present in version 8.6.3)
On Windows 10, using USB control with ATEM Mini Extreme ISO and crash dumps pointing to Switchers.sys

Here is a snip of the crash dump analysis:

SYMBOL_NAME: Switchers+21d3
MODULE_NAME: Switchers
IMAGE_NAME: Switchers.sys
STACK_COMMAND: .cxr 0xffff8a04ec716ba0 ; kb
BUCKET_ID_FUNC_OFFSET: 21d3
FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: 0x3B_c0000005_Switchers!unknown_function
OS_VERSION: 10.0.19041.1
BUILDLAB_STR: vb_release
OSPLATFORM_TYPE: x64
OSNAME: Windows 10

Issue seems to be intermittent. Will do some more testing and report back in a bit.

Please report this to Blackmagic Tech -- not sure posting on this Forum will get it resolved, and that's a serious and significant finding.

I have not updated to 8.6.3. I noticed that 8.6.4 is available. Have you tried this and did it resolve the BSOD?

Respectfully

Just got my Atem mini on friday, running 8.6.4 and got two BSOD today with reference to switchers.sys

By chance did any of you raise a support ticket and got any feedback on this issue?

BR,
Peter

We also experienced three instances of BSOD during our live Sunday service broadcast. We are running ATEM Software version 8.6.1 and uses OBS to as the primary stream to Facebook and our ATEM Mini Pro as the backup stream. The switcher is connected to our PC via USB and Ethernet. We also use the Companion app which connects our Stream Deck to our ATEM Mini Pro. We encounter this problem too many times and we have no idea how to fix this, anyone has a fix?

The blue screen reads as:

Stop code: SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION
What failed: Switchers.sys

Hi all

Does someone success with an error report to Black Magic of this issue with BSOD on Windows?
Should we create a list of hardware and graphic cards that are effected to help the forward with this problem.
I am using Dell XPS 13 9380 Windows 10.

The problem does not exist on Mac?

Hi there, did you get anywhere? Recently a Dell laptop BSOD once during the two times we did a livestream, after we did a firmware update just beforehand...

Is it possible to downgrade the firmware back to an earlier version?

LoYukFai wrote:Is it possible to downgrade the firmware back to an earlier version?

install older software version and hold the left upper button on the mini when plug in the power

Left upper button = Mic 1's "ON" button, right?

Thanks!

yes, hold and power the mini

FWIW, I submitted a ticket to BMD and, basically they said this is an isolated problem (obviously, otherwise you'd have seen this thread go boom) and they're not going to look into it.

Will try to troubleshoot further... if to no avail, then downgrade the firmware...

Cheers.

Hello all,

I'm also getting a BSOD issue, got 3 crashes in one week, using atem software control and zoom software (connecting to the atel with a RJ45 and the usb connection (for webcam to zoom). I however did one job where I didn't get a crash, and on that job I was using the RJ45 connection to the PC but not the usb one. So it does look like a usb issue. However on my BSOD logs I can't see references to atem software control or switchers.sys . Where do you guys look for theses logs ? I look in event viewers and reliability monitors and can't see anything in particular except that the computer crashed. I was using a macbook pro previously and never got any crashes ...

Is there a known working older version we may roll back to?

I have been having the same issue lately as well..... what I have noticed that it will occur AFTER my Anti-Virus gets updated ( Avast Free ) ... then switching back to the ATEM software Control v.8.6.3....... coincidence perhaps???

I'm not using any antivirus, except the built-in windows anti-virus. I have stopped using my PC for atem jobs, I can't risk another crash in the middle of a stream ...

If anyone has a solution it would be great.

If many people have this problem Blackmagic should look into it, but I guess that, considering how many atem users are using PCs, since this thread has limited success it must mean that it's a rare issue (unfortunately for us).

Well, if this thread shows that loads of people are having this BSOD issue, I'm sure Blackmagic will look into it.

From what I understood I thought it was not a widespread problem, unfortunately for us. Are you using zoom ? Personally, I seemed to have the issue when using the atem together with zoom. I've swtched back to using a macbook pro for my live streams at the moment, which is a shame because I had bought a PC laptop to devote it exclusively to streaming jobs. However I can't put up with such unreliability for my customers' live streams...

Anyone else having this BSOD problem ? Is everyone with the problem using zoom, is anyone just using ATEM software control and getting BSODs ?

I have the same problem, "feels" like back in the 8.5 days I did not.
"Feels" like it happens more frequent with Zoom, but I did experience it at least once with BigBlueButton.
OS is Win10 with current updates, ATEM mini at newest 8.6 and no PiP, just straight FDH feed from an HDMI source.
I had the BSOD on two Laptops during Zoom conferences last Monday / Tuesday:
1. Lenovo T460p, i7-6820HQ (4x 2.7 - 3.6 GHz, 8MB Cache, 8 Threads) w/ nVidia 940MX
2. Lenovo X250, Intel Core i7-5600U, 2,6 - 3,2 GHz, 4MB Cache, Intel vPro w/o dGPU, Intel graphics only

I'm currently trying to reproduce the crashes and then isolate if not using Zoom and/or not running ATEM control software while streaming helps.

This is very annoying, borderline purpose-defeating for a live mixer.
The laptos are a few years old, but CPU load is low and they are as "high quality business latop" as it gets. The ATEM install on the X250 is fresh, newest ATEM software from Blackmagic, never was a previous version installed on this machine.

Since I use it for remote teaching at very low wage at a community college while reducing my day job hours to do so hiring a professional assitant is not viable.

Please BlackMagic, help! I'm so happy with my ATEM mini and Resolve Studio but this is a real problem,
and it appears to be software/drivers introduced with 8.6 .

I'm using an HP elitebook (i5 6300U, 8GB Ram, windows 10 pro, intel 520 graphics). Since I got those crashes I've stopped using the laptop for work but I have tested it several times, using atem software and broadcasting to a zoom call, for 10 hours non-stop, but haven't been able to reproduce the issue, unfortunately.

I also messaged blackmagic support and this is what they replied :
"
We agree that the behaviour is most likely cause by some pease of PC hardware such as a USB Chip.
With the wide range and inconsistency of PC Hardware we could not say for certain without seeing the behaviour for ourselves.
We are continuing our investigation but as of yet have not been able to replicate the behaviour.
"

Is anyone succesfully using an atem mini with an hp elitebook (a pretty common computer) ?

I've been doing tests by running atem software control with a zoom conference + broadcasting to youtube (which is our usual setup for our customers) on my hp elitebook. Did a fairly long test (5 hours), was begining to think that the problem had disappeared, but then after around 5 and a half hour I did get a crash.

This time I took the time to find out how to read the dump files (used whocrashed software). And although some of my crashes are also due to "switchers.sys" as others have reported, I've also had a few crashes due to ntoskrnl.exe and ntkrnlmp.exe. I copied the detailed reports below.

Does anyone have a clue of what to do about this ?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

On Mon 31/01/2022 21:50:15 your computer crashed or a problem was reported
crash dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\013122-10953-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe (nt+0x3F72E0)
Bugcheck code: 0x3B (0xC0000005, 0xFFFFF8003448929E, 0xFFFFF50D22906BE0, 0x0)
Error: SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION
file path: C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: NT Kernel & System
Bug check description: This indicates that an exception happened while executing a routine that transitions from non-privileged code to privileged code.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem.
The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver that cannot be identified at this time.



On Mon 31/01/2022 21:50:15 your computer crashed or a problem was reported
crash dump file: C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP
This was probably caused by the following module: ntkrnlmp.exe (nt!setjmpex+0x8239)
Bugcheck code: 0x3B (0xC0000005, 0xFFFFF8003448929E, 0xFFFFF50D22906BE0, 0x0)
Error: SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION
Bug check description: This indicates that an exception happened while executing a routine that transitions from non-privileged code to privileged code.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem.
The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver that cannot be identified at this time.


On Tue 14/12/2021 14:27:57 your computer crashed or a problem was reported
crash dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\121421-7218-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: switchers.sys (0xFFFFF8061C3821D3)
Bugcheck code: 0x50 (0xFFFFD30BC8634023, 0x2, 0xFFFFF8061C3821D3, 0x2)
Error: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
file path: C:\Windows\system32\drivers\switchers.sys
product: Blackmagic Design USB Driver
company: Blackmagic Design
description: Blackmagic Design USB Driver
Bug check description: This indicates that invalid system memory has been referenced.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem.
A third party driver was identified as the probable root cause of this system error. It is suggested you look for an update for the following driver: switchers.sys (Blackmagic Design USB Driver, Blackmagic Design).
Google query: switchers.sys Blackmagic Design PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA

Just to say we've also joined this rather unhappy club with an Atem Extreme Iso. BSOD twice in two days.

I tried a 10h Zoom "conference" with my two Lenovos, no crash.

Then this morning I tried to enter an instance of BigBlueButton (FOSS browser-based web conf / teleeducation SW) and boom: BSOD before I even touched the camera feed enable button. Must have happened as BBB enumerated the possible video and audio sources.
This time I let the BSOD write the memory dump in peace and will post the extracted info later.

ATEM control was running on the Laptop the Mini was connected to by USB.

I'd decided to switch to another laptop, a Dell Lattitude E5550 , which I took through a 12 hour test running atem software control + a zoom conference, broadcasting to youtube.

Got no crashes, so I used the computer for 2 jobs... And then got 3 "switchers.sys" crashes in 2 days ! And this time, on one of the jobs I was not using Zoom but gotowebinar (and that's the day I got 2 crashes), so I don't think the problem is specifically linked to zoom.

My opinion is now that this is probably a more widespread problem than I first thought. Switching to a completely different laptop did not make the crashes go away (went from an HP elitebook to a dell lattitude, both pretty common machines). Also I now got crashes even when not using zoom.
I believe a lot of people have not come across the problem simply because they were lucky enough and/or because they don't use the atem for very long sessions. Every time I got a crash, it was after at least 3 hours of broadcasting. So maybe most users do shorter sessions. This would also explain why Blackmagic support told me they couldn't reproduce the issue: because they didn't test for long enough. In my case, I tested the Dell Lattitude for 12 hours without a crash, but afterwards I did get one !!

This kind of unpredictability totally kills the product for me. Could Blackmagic please look into this issue seriously ?

It would also be great if some PC users tried running very long tests and see if they get the dreaded "switchers.sys" BSOD crash and report back here. It's important to connect PC and atem using USB. I use a little app call whocrashed (https://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed) to easily read the crash dumps.

Hi,

I am just flagging on this thread that we too have the BSOD issue, so hopefully BMD see enough people having the problem and do something.

Looking at a couple of recent memory.dmp files - once was in switchers.sys and one in netio

I thought I had solved it with a BIOS update and also by starting from a cold boot each time. However 2 Sundays later and we have had 2 BSODs in the same Sunday service last week.

Our worst moment for one so far was a BSOD as a funeral service was about to start just as the coffin was coming out of the hearse! At least for us we stream directly from the Mini Pro and just use the laptop for monitoring things so the funeral still streamed ok!

Anyway hoping to hear of a fix soon

I have personally - momentarily - given up on using my atems with pcs, and use macbook pros instead, which never crashed with atems in 3 years of use.

I also have been in contact with blackmagic about the issue and they basically said they had lots of laptop pcs running with atems 24/7 and never get crashes, and can't reproduce our issue. I'm still convinced there is something wrong with the atem usb connection to pcs (switchers.sys driver), since I got crashes with several atem minis and with several laptops (dell & hp). If there are enough users reporting I believe (hope) blackmagic could look into the issue more seriously ...

I'm also seeing this issue on Windows 11
SYMBOL_NAME: Switchers+21d3
MODULE_NAME: Switchers
IMAGE_NAME: Switchers.sys
STACK_COMMAND: .cxr 0xfffffe01790eec20 ; kb
BUCKET_ID_FUNC_OFFSET: 21d3
FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: AV_Switchers!unknown_function

I've reported it to BM support and pointed them at this thread too. Just in case.

I have the same issue with Windows 11 after the firmware upgrade.

Multiple crashes on different computers, Win10/11
Blue screen shows the cause: Switchers.sys
Recent crashes on 8.6.7
test's for 8.7 have started

Thank you

Hello everyone!

I join the BSOD "club" with Windows 10 (21H1) (legal) and with reference to the already famous "Switcher.sys" file. The installed version of Atem Control Software was 8.6.1. The console is the Atem Mini Extreme ISO with 8 channels HDMI, connected by USB 3.0 type A (type C in the Atem), and by Network through a 5-port Network Switch. sometimes with Atem Software Control and Companion open (for the Stream Deck) and other times the BSOD has occurred only with Atem Software Control open on the laptop, which, by the way, is an MSI GT73 7RD TITAN (Intel GEN 7 4 cores - 8 threads, Nvidia GTX 1060 in graphics and 32 GB of RAM..., Nvme Pci express GEN 3 SSD disk plus an SSD for data..., come on!, which is not due to overload!).

I start testing with 8.7.1 and also with the USB C 3.1 connection on the laptop, which also acts as Thunderbolt, although I seem to remember that this port also gave me a BSOD...

Blackmagic can't ignore this problem... If it does and it's not solved, I plan to return the console... They'll see what they do, but Blackmagic technical support doesn't work as we all expect it to..., at least for Spain It is very, very deficient, and if you have a problem, manage as you can, regrettable! And many times there is no choice but to return the product and not buy Blackmagic products anymore.

If the tests work and I see that the problem is solved, I will comment here. I will also try to do a Firmware Downgrade if I see that it is not resolved with 8.7.1...

Greetings to all and, unfortunately, I can only say that, LUCK! for everyone and/or that BLACKMAGIC DEFINITELY SOLVES THIS PROBLEM.

Thank you!

While they were always quite intermittent for me, I think that 8.9 has finally solved this for me.

Running Windows 10 Pro 21H2, USB A port -> Swissonic 16 port USB hub -> Atem mini (and lots of other stuff).

Opposite report here: brand new Lenovo Thinkpad T16 Gen1 (AMD, my other Thinkpads are Intel) with v8.9 gave me a BSOD during a company Zoom meeting.
Fresh Windows, machine was unpacked 2 weeks ago, no older ATEM software was ever installed.

Current workaround: stream from Linux, have a second Laptop with ATEM control for audio levels, etc.

Please BackMagic Design: may we have a control SW for Linux?

G'day,

Is there a solution to this yet?

Well, it appears that this issue is still ongoing into 2023 and version 9.1 of ATEM. I experienced a BSOD in the middle of a production.

The ATEM install is on a Windows 11 laptop with 32GB RAM and i7 CPU. I confirmed the BSOD as caused by Switchcers.sys using WinDBG against the crashdump file.

This forum entry is specifically related to version 8.6 so I will no drone on. I will simply upgrade to the latest install (v9.3.1) and check for stability. If not, I will start working backwards until I find a stable version.

ATEM extreme iso Version 9.32 multiple blue screen crashes windows 10 pro
Switchers.sys on the blue screen