Fix: Windows 7 Blue Screen caused by ntoskrnl.exe error 0x000000f4

For several months now I've had this error, which causes my server to randomly blue screen and restart. I don't typically notice this though, as virtual machines running on top of the server are preset to auto boot once windows has restarted (thanks to VMWare workstation 8 shared VM feature). I've looked at this issue in the passed and presumed it must either be hardware related or a bad install of Windows server 2008 R2 (This also applies to Win 7).

I think I may have just gotten to the cause issue of it. If you've come across this page and you use a DLNA program called Serviio, keep reading, otherwise your issue could be unrelated (although as described below, it was a combination of serviio, java and ffmpeg).

I'd previously looked at the blue screen minidumps using some analyzer which didn't seem to say more than the error was f4 caused by ntoskrnl.exe which didn't leave me with much to try and figure out what really was causing it. A quick google on it will show the number of people having frustrating unexplained issues with it.

Something I should have done ages ago was simply to open the windows Event Viewer. Looking at logs around the time of crashes showed something quite interesting and unexpected:

Faulting application name: ffmpeg.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4ee7d185
Faulting module name: ffmpeg.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4ee7d185
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0071e4e3
Faulting process id: 0x10f0
Faulting application start time: 0x01cd8d892d613b00
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Serviio\lib\ffmpeg.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Serviio\lib\ffmpeg.exe
Report Id: 6c28bf8e-f97c-11e1-8d1f-940c6d82d8ea

A bit more googling on this, and hopefully I have a fix for the crashing. Time will tell, as the blue screen restarts are quite random (might go a day without it, or a week) and often when the server is idle and not having any major resources accessed.

Hopeful fix:

Installed latest Serviio (1.01)

Downloaded and installed offline version of Java x64 (forum suggestion) - uninstall any previous versions of Java you have installed first.

Manually downloaded latest ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/) and put in it C:\Program Files\Serviio\lib\

Update:

Well it's only been a day since I wrote this post, but a bit more research into this has shown that for me at least, it is somehow Serviio related. Thanks to a brilliant forum post I found while trying to find a better BSoD dump analyser, I discovered http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=analyze. This website allows you to upload your BSoD minidump and will analyze it for you! Brilliant!

Example of one of my Minidumps here.

Update #2:

A month 1/2 now and no bluescreens! Issue for me = closed!