"Could not download information. Unable to connect to remote server.

Mac OS X can also have permissions issues in SMB shares. Individual files can be set wrong. Used to happen to me all the time.

Right click on the folder containing the files you are sharing, "Get Info". Unlock the padlock at the bottom of this window. If it's a public share and there's no password then you can just make sure that "everyone" has read/write access, then click on the gear at the bottom and "apply to enclosed items"

I hear that changing permissions from "Get Info" can be a little wonky sometimes (I wouldn't use it in other areas where you need to change permissions), but for something like this it should be okay. Obviously there are terminal commands for this as well, but I can't for the life of me remember a nice and free GUI utility that also works very well. I'm sure someone more experienced than I can probably give the best/easier advice for changing file permissions.

I've been testing and experimenting upgrading/downgrading the last 3 versions of the software: 10.0-7, 10.0-8, and 10.0-9 for the past 2 hours or so.

This is definitely an issue since 10.0-8. Both 10.0.8 and 10.0-9 have this issue. If you downgrade to 10.0-7 the issue goes away. Unfortunately 10-0-7 has the old incorrect audio downmix problem where if you listen on a 2 channel system all the front audio is in the right channel and all the rear audio is in the left. Not a good solution for my bedroom TV that isn't hooked up to a stereo.

So I get to choose if I want a working scraper, or a proper audio-mix

This is definitely not an SMB permission issue or any issue to do with your file server at all, as the problem goes away if you downgrade to 10-0-7. I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 as my file server running SAMBA. Hopefully a new version comes out soon to fix this.

Im also pretty sure it hasn't anything to do with my setup. On my network
i have win7 boxes, ubuntu boxes and NFS boxes and i havent changed
any thing on my network for ages.

And until i upgraded to one of the latest nightly's the problem showed up. Off-course running unstable nightly's i must expect that i get problems so
i can always move back to the official supported build

After some more digging into the problem it seems like xbmc suddenly has more generic network problems, not only when using scrapers but also when trying
to browse smb workgroups....

its a known issue on trunk and 10.0-9 , its being looked at

amet Wrote:its a known issue on trunk and 10.0-9 , its being looked at

Thanks for the info :-)

Other than this issue, XBMC on my AppleTV2 works great. My mom uses it as a unit for her bedroom TV, (of course I administer it). I find that the skin, "PMD.HD" works well, especially if you turn off the extra animations (so you basically only have disolves/fades between menus). The bedroom TV is an older 2007 32" LG HDTV which is only 720p anyhow (1366x768) so 1080p output doesn't matter to me.

I think a really good option that should be added to the AppleTV2 version of XBMC is the ability for the software to not add HD movies to the library while scraping that are NOT in h264 codec. Most of my HD movies are in h264 but a few of them are in xvid/divx (people should not encode HD with those old codecs). As you guys know, the AppleTV2 can't accelerate HD that isn't in h264 so it would be handy if the AppleTV2 could auto-remove movies that it knows won't play back properly. So the AppleTV's movie/tv show library would ONLY be filled with compatible 720p/1080p h264 files while omiting the incompatible HD movies in other codecs. I'd imagine this wouldn't be too hard to add since the scraper already detects the codec and resolution of each movie/tv show when it displays those little "720p" and "h264" icons in the media info for each movie. All that the software would need to do is anytime a movie came back as 720p or 1080p and a codec other than h264, it would auto-remove it from the AppleTV's library. This way all the movies will show up in the library on my full HTPC in the living room while the library on the AppleTV2 will only show the HD movies that actually work on the AppleTV2.

Each time I add a source then try and scrape the source iam getting the error, Could not download information. Unable to connect to remote server aswell. I find if you keep pressing ok the service resumes again.

Hoping for a fix soon.

This is happening with 10.1 (stable, no nightly) for Windows too. I switched to IMDB... no errors when I launch XBMC.
Maybe something changed at TMDB?

mcpish Wrote:I think a really good option that should be added to the AppleTV2 version of XBMC is the ability for the software to not add HD movies to the library while scraping that are NOT in h264 codec.

You can already do this by using smart playlists. Smart playlists can exclude movies by codec and resolution.

Remember though, right now we don't believe the non-hd h264 codec decoding is a hardware issue. It should be possible for the atv2's GPU to decode a lot greater range, but this will take time.

mcpish Wrote:I've been testing and experimenting upgrading/downgrading the last 3 versions of the software: 10.0-7, 10.0-8, and 10.0-9 for the past 2 hours or so.

This is definitely an issue since 10.0-8. Both 10.0.8 and 10.0-9 have this issue. If you downgrade to 10.0-7 the issue goes away. Unfortunately 10-0-7 has the old incorrect audio downmix problem where if you listen on a 2 channel system all the front audio is in the right channel and all the rear audio is in the left. Not a good solution for my bedroom TV that isn't hooked up to a stereo.

How do you recognize which version is 10.0-7? Do you have a date for it?

ashlar Wrote:How do you recognize which version is 10.0-7? Do you have a date for it?

All the old versions are here with the dates posted:
http://mirrors.xbmc.org/apt/atv2/deb/

To check what version of xbmc you have installed on your ATV2:
1. SSH into your ATV2 (using "root" as username and "alpine" as password if you haven't changed it)
2. type "dpkg -l org.xbmc.xbmc-atv2" without the quotes.
This will display version info about the xbmc package installed on your ATV2

To get an old version such as 10.0-7:
1. SSH into your ATV2 (using "root" as username and "alpine" as password if you haven't changed it)
2. type the command:
"wget http://mirrors.xbmc.org/apt/atv2/deb/org...os-arm.deb" again without quotes.

this will download the "deb" package file to the current directory on your ATV2, then to install it type:
"dpkg -i http://mirrors.xbmc.org/apt/atv2/deb/org...os-arm.deb" without quotes.

You can try out any of the other versions listed on the page by substituting the filename in those commands with the one you want from that page.

For users that are familiar with Ubuntu/Debian Linux this will be very familiar since this is the same way that software installs/configuration works on those operating systems using the programme, Apt.