[hermann_x5]

I think it just may be the number of playlists.

For me I am quite sure that my playlists should not have problems. I am creating most of my playlists with a tool since I want to have specific movies included in them -> so they all look exactly the same (except for the movie titles).

For example my next Hitchcock Movie Weekend Playlist looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="movies">
<name>Weekend_Hitch</name>
<match>one</match><rule field="title" operator="is">
<value>Die Vögel</value>
</rule><rule field="title" operator="is">
<value>Vertigo - Aus dem Reich der Toten</value>
</rule><rule field="title" operator="is">
<value>Familiengrab</value>
</rule></smartplaylist>

A list of Pacino movies I'd like to watch on one of the other weekends looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="movies">
<name>Weekend_Pacino</name>
<match>one</match><rule field="title" operator="is">
<value>Der Duft der Frauen</value>
</rule><rule field="title" operator="is">
<value>Danny Collins</value>
</rule><rule field="title" operator="is">
<value>...und Gerechtigkeit für alle</value>
</rule></smartplaylist>

And I have tons of these. They are created in my tool and automatically copied to my shield.

Currently I only copy the next one to my shield and delete it after the weekend.

When I had the crashes I had ~ 30 of these tool generated "non smart playlists" as well as ~ 30 smart playlists created in Kodi. So, overall around 60 playlists.

[Cory1980]

I think it just may be the number of playlists.

For me I am quite sure that my playlists should not have problems. I am creating most of my playlists with a tool since I want to have specific movies included in them -> so they all look exactly the same (except for the movie titles).

For example my next Hitchcock Movie Weekend Playlist looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="movies">
<name>Weekend_Hitch</name>
<match>one</match><rule field="title" operator="is">
<value>Die Vögel</value>
</rule><rule field="title" operator="is">
<value>Vertigo - Aus dem Reich der Toten</value>
</rule><rule field="title" operator="is">
<value>Familiengrab</value>
</rule></smartplaylist>

A list of Pacino movies I'd like to watch on one of the other weekends looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="movies">
<name>Weekend_Pacino</name>
<match>one</match><rule field="title" operator="is">
<value>Der Duft der Frauen</value>
</rule><rule field="title" operator="is">
<value>Danny Collins</value>
</rule><rule field="title" operator="is">
<value>...und Gerechtigkeit für alle</value>
</rule></smartplaylist>

And I have tons of these. They are created in my tool and automatically copied to my shield.

Currently I only copy the next one to my shield and delete it after the weekend.

When I had the crashes I had ~ 30 of these tool generated "non smart playlists" as well as ~ 30 smart playlists created in Kodi. So, overall around 60 playlists.

Good to know. Although I hope the number of playlists isn't the issue... I use them like TV channels, they're fun to make for specific watching. My playlist files are also in the same format you posted. I created some from within Kodi, and used those files generated as templates to make more with similar rules in Notepad++ because it was easier. I'll experiment with total number of playlists, as well as look for problems in the syntax of my files and update here.

[Cory1980]

So as of writing this... the magic number seems to be 49. If I have 50 or more playlists in my playlists/video folder, it causes the force-close. I checked all of the playlists' syntax... everything looked good. I then moved all playlists into an external folder, then adding a few back at a time and clearing the cache and rebooting the system each time.

At 50 is when it started having the issue. So at the moment, I have 6 playlists backed up to an external folder on my PC while I have my best 49 of the bunch in Kodi... and so far it's working.

This is repeatable every time... when it's a problem, it force closes within 5 seconds of opening on a fresh boot.

I would be curious to see if anyone can confirm this does the same thing to them on their ShieldTV Pro system. Luckily, it seems like it could be an easy fix now that it's known... hopefully? I wonder if there is a work-around in the meantime?

But either way, I'm glad I finally got to the bottom of this and know how to prevent it. The 6 playlists I had to move to a backup were rarely used anyway... so it's not a big deal for now.

[hermann_x5]

Wow, Kudos for your work !

I just tried this on my non-main Shield. I copied all my currend "weekend"-playlists to this shield and landed at overall 53 playlists. Did a restart and "bam": within 2 seconds of starting Kodi it auto-closed ! This being a Shield on which I used Kodi nearly daily in the last 2 months without any problem (I use this for watching music concerts during workouts).

I then deleted all these additional playlists and have now 28 in my folder. And Kodi seems to be working fine again...

So, yes, it seems I can confirm your theory....

[Cory1980]

Wow, crazy. I hope this gets a fix at some point. Thanks for all of your feedback and testing what I've found on your system, good to know something else isn't faulty with my setup!

Since I've left both of my systems overnight with less than 49 playlists... they both still had Kodi open after turning my ShieldTV on and waking it up. That hasn't been the case in a long time, it would always wake up to my Shield's home screen due to a crash in Kodi.

[Cory1980]

Update:

So after a couple of weeks of working perfectly after narrowing down the problem to the number of playlists... Kodi force-closed today after a movie finished. I thought that was strange, so I rebooted... started up Kodi and it auto-closed on me. It wasn't quite as fast as within the first 5 seconds like before, it was closer to a minute... and it repeated. I haven't added any new playlists since I understood the issue. So I went through the same process as before, and I have deleted 3 playlists and am down to 46 total, and it seems fine again for now.

This seems like a strange bug that could possibly be a fairly easy fix, I don't know. Maybe @Hitcher can report this to be looked at for future updates? I would really like to add more playlists at some point. Right now I have them backed up and swapping a few out that I'm wanting.

[crcjh]

Thank you so much for this analysis. I had over 100 playlists and Kodi had been randomly crashing for the last 12 months both on v19.4 and the new v20. 

I’ve taken the number of playlists down to 40 and so far no more crashes. 

thanks again.

[htpcero]

@Cory1980 that is for sharing the finding! I have been having this issue on my shield as well since I bought the shield, in my case I have more than 100 "smart" music playlists. I use the same playlists in 4 different Kodi instances (two raspberry pi, one small Linux server and the shield), none had an issue except the shield. I just deleted 60 playlists from the shield, so far so good.
Truly hoping that this can be fixed

[Cory1980]

I am just reading these new replies, glad I could help!

Something else I've noticed recently... that even keeping the number of smart playlists below 50, Kodi will start to stutter and eventually force quit (under a specific condition). It does this when you're playing a long playlist, regardless if it's a smart playlist... or just a long sequence of music videos in a certain genre etc. After about 30 mins to an hour, the video starts to heavily buffer and will eventually force close Kodi. Removing ALL smart playlists from the system seems to solve this issue. So it seems like there's something inherently buggy built into the smart playlist feature that can cause Kodi problems... which is a shame. Smart playlists are pretty essential for my setup.