[Bug]: App hangs/shows "Not Responding" during "Checking FFmpeg" stage (Manual FFmpeg placement did not resolve)

[albertchou667788-source]

Before reporting

• I'm on the latest release and the issue still happens.
• I searched existing issues and didn't find a duplicate.

What happened?

When the setup reaches the "Checking FFmpeg" stage, the application window status changes to "Not Responding" and hangs for a very long time. I have already tried manually copying the three files (ffmpeg.exe, ffplay.exe, and ffprobe.exe) from the bin folder of ffmpeg-8.1.2-essentials_build into the data/ffmpeg/ directory. However, this didn't seem to work, and the program remains frozen.

Steps to reproduce

After extracting the zip file and running the .exe, the setup hangs at the "Checking FFmpeg" stage and shows no response for over 15 minutes.

Operating system

Windows

StemDeck version

StemDeck-Windows-x64

How did you install it?

Windows ZIP

Logs / screenshots

No response

[thcp]

Hi @albertchou667788-source could you please confirm your location? im receiving a lot of reports from users from either Asia or Australia, on the ffmpeg setup.

[albertchou667788-source]

I come from Taiwan "I'm really excited to use this. Can this problem be fixed soon?"

[thcp]

Hi @albertchou667788-source, thank you for the report, and I am sorry for the frustrating wait.

The "Not Responding" freeze at the "Checking FFmpeg" stage is the setup waiting on a very slow FFmpeg download from gyan.dev, a single mirror that is especially slow from Asia. That is the same root cause behind several reports we have received from your region.

The next release fixes this by downloading FFmpeg from GitHub's CDN, which is much faster from Taiwan, and by improving detection of an FFmpeg you place yourself in data/ffmpeg. Either way, you should get past this step quickly.

The change is in an open pull request (#249) and will ship in the next release, so it should be resolved soon. Thank you for your patience and your enthusiasm, it means a lot.

You can follow release updates on X (Twitter) at https://x.com/StemDeckApp and Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/stemdeck.

[thcp]

Sorted :) based on our discord chat