Windows Debugging with GDB

If you are experiencing a crash or freeze with OpenShot in Windows 10/11, the following step by step instructions will help you determine the cause of the crash. These instructions will display a stack trace of OpenShot's source code, at the location of the crash. This information can be extremely useful for our development team, and very useful to attach to bug reports (for a quicker resolution).

Install MSYS2 Dependencies

The Windows version of OpenShot is compiled using an environment called MSYS2. In order to attach the GDB debugger to our executable, openshot-qt.exe, you must first install MSYS2.

1. Download & Install MSYS2: http://www.msys2.org/
2. Run MSYS2 MinGW64 terminal / command prompt (for example: C:\msys64\msys2_shell.cmd)
3. Update all packages (Copy/Paste the following command): pacman -Syu
4. Install GDB debugger (Copy/Paste the following command): pacman -S --needed --disable-download-timeout mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain
5. Update the PATH (Copy/Paste the following commands):

export PATH="/c/Program Files/OpenShot Video Editor/lib:$PATH"
export PATH="/c/Program Files/OpenShot Video Editor/lib/PyQt5:$PATH"

6. Load OpenShot into the GDB debugger (Copy/Paste the following commands):

cd "/c/Program Files/OpenShot Video Editor/"
gdb openshot-qt.exe

7. Launch OpenShot from GDB prompt (Copy/Paste the following command):

run