[Fire69]

Hey,

I know there are already plenty of other topics about this problem, but they are all flooded with people saying you have to look at your network-setup and things like that.

I already tried all that... smb/ftp, wireless/wired, .... no change.

So today, I tried something different.
I copied a file locally onto the atv2 to see how it would play.

And guess what... It buffers just as bad as when I play it over the network!!
So now that I've eliminated that, I'd like to know how I can solve this without people telling me my network sucks!

Here's the relevant piece of my xbmc-log:
http://pastebin.com/qnpjP9ga

Went into Video - Files - Media (local source I added) and started 'Alice in Wonderland.iso'
After about 2 minutes (during that time my vq went from 99 down to 60 back to 99 and so on) it started buffering.

The file is on average about 5Mb/s, so the atv2 should be able to handle that just fine, right?

Hope someone can help me with this...

[yabbiman]

What version is your ATV2 on and what version XBMC do you run?

[Fire69]

Sorry, forgot to mention that

My atv is at 4.2.1 (4.1) but I've tried newer also, jailbreak done with GP RC6.1
I'm running the latest offical (19/06).

[rbronco21]

Do you have de-interlacing turned on? Try turning it off. I was getting what I thought was random buffering until I finally figured out that 480i dvds buffer if de-interlacing is turned on and 480p dvds didn't. I have an older nightly, but I haven't heard that this has changed.

By the way, this didn't fix the dvd menu slowdown, just the actual movie playback.

[Fire69]

Nope, I'm not using deinterlacing.

Menu's not a problem by the way, all my dvd's only have the main movie, I strip out all the other stuff.

[yabbiman]

Fire, let me advise you to go back to http://hadm.net/xbmc/latest_atv2.deb this version. The latest release is kind of buggy, lots of people complain about high cpu loads/buffering issues.

[menno]

There are so many topics on this.

Assum .iso not working for now, if they do party be lucky.
Its something in their structure that makes atv2 xbmc go nuts.

Seperate vob files and even ifo files do seem to work sometimes.

Anyways join one of the serious topics out here, and post logs etc.
So far the priority by atv2 devs has been low, which of course is their good right!

[Fire69]

Fire, let me advise you to go back to http://hadm.net/xbmc/latest_atv2.deb this version. The latest release is kind of buggy, lots of people complain about high cpu loads/buffering issues.

Until a couple of days ago, I was using the latest nightly, same problem.

I'll give it another go, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to solve anything..

There are so many topics on this.

Assum .iso not working for now, if they do party be lucky.
Its something in their structure that makes atv2 xbmc go nuts.

Seperate vob files and even ifo files do seem to work sometimes.

Anyways join one of the serious topics out here, and post logs etc.
So far the priority by atv2 devs has been low, which of course is their good right!

I know there are already many topics about it, I said so in the OP

What's not serious about this topic then? I posted a log, I'm willing to test anything...
As I said, everybody keeps saying it's a network-problem, but it's NOT!

That's what I don't get, Keith said the same thing in one of those other topics, there not giving this high priority, they are working on making the UI smoother and so.
What's wrong with the UI? It's plenty smooth already...
What use is a smooth UI to me if I can't play my media?

Don't get me wrong, I love XBMC, been using it since 2003, and as I said in the other topic, I even donated, but I just don't get why a media playback-problem is less important then anything else. That's the essence of XBMC, right?

[yabbiman]

Fire have you tried this, turning off all database related crap, movie scrapers, disable download movie info, actor info, level volume, etc. Just use plain file mode.
This does speed up things, maybe enough also in your setup.

[Fire69]

Haven't tried that, I'll give it a go tonight!
But I am already using the file-mode to test everything, so I don't know if disabling all those things will make a big difference.

[Eliah]

Just to clearify, the buffering error only occurs when playing .iso files right? What i have heard is that .iso support is not a priority as few people use this format the simplest way of doing it is re-encode your media to a supported format

[Fire69]

.iso and video_ts actually

I don't get why it's not a priority.
It works just fine on my 8-year-old xbox.

But that's beside the question actually
Lots of people have it working just fine, so I'm just bummed it's not working for me.

I'm not really keen on re-encoding +300 iso's to mkv actually.
BTW, lots of people already said I should just use MakeMKV because it's really fast and easy.
True, but they buffer too!!

[Eliah]

My iso files does not play well with atv2, but I only have 2 Are your iso's ripped by you or are they according to "scene" rips? And does a "scene" spec mkv cause buffering?

[Fire69]

The reason for the iso's is simple.
I started collecting them when .mkv wasn't very popular yet, and since I only really collect childrens-movies with multiple languages (Dutch for now, English when my kids get a little older) I went for the .isos

90% of those files are 1:1 rips to .iso with dvd-decrypter and then with dvd-shrink (at 100%, no re-encoding!) I extract the main movie and languages.

I guess that's an ok way to make those isos, so that should not cause the problems.

Anyway, I just did another test.
I converted 1 .iso with MakeMKV to .mkv, so the only thing that really changed is the container, the stream is still mpeg2

When I play it through smb, it works better then the .iso, but it still buffers regularly.
When I play it through ftp, it seems to be ok. Didn't watch the entire movie, but the vq stays pretty stable at 99 most of the time.

I guess I'll convert the movies the kids watch most to mkv for now, and just keep my hopes up that there will be a solution for the iso-playback soon enough...