HD content hesitating, audio clipping and horrible battery life in bluetooth.
#1
The items listed in the title are obviously different issues, but I'll explain what I'm seeing and hopefully someone can help resolve them.

I set up my XBMC system on top of Ubuntu 10.10 running on an ECS H55H-I motherboard, an i3-550 (3.2GHz dual-core with hyperthreading) and 4GB of Corsair DDR3-1600. My video card is a GeForce 7300GT 256MB card from an older Mac Pro as the onboard video wasn't able to keep up. Audio is through a 3.5mm to RCA jack for stereo audio to my receiver. I'd really like digital audio working through optical but I don't think it will work. Right now, it's connected to a 21" monitor at 1680x1050 and other than an occasional redraw line halfway down the screen, there haven't been huge issues, until lately. I have a D-Link Bluetooth USB adapter connected to the back and a PS3 remote working perfectly.

The system worked fine for some time, I've had video files stored locally as well as on a remote linux server feeding content out through an NFS share. Within the last few months, when I try to play HD content, movies and TV shows that previously played fine, playback will hang, anywhere from half an hour down to every few minutes. A couple times it threw me back to the menu screen saying there was a problem with playback, sometimes it goes to buffering, then resumes, and sometimes just seems to pause for 10-15 seconds but not so far as to actually say it's buffering. The problem happened right after installing OS updates, although I can't say right this minute what was updated. I tried playing content from the local drive as well as from the NAS and results were the same, so I don't believe it has anything to do with network. I upgraded Ubuntu to 11.04 and for a couple weeks, the problem went away, but this week it came back, again right after performing an update. I can't look at the logs to see exactly what was updated, but I can get to that later.

For the second issue, every now and then, I've seen this issue three times now, audio will go strange. The best I can describe it is to say that it sounds like it's been digitized. It does this in playback, in menus and even in Ubuntu if I exit out of XBMC. To get it back to normal, I have to reboot the box.

Lastly, battery life on the PS3 remote is horrible. New Duracell batteries will be dead within two weeks and Energizer Lithium batteries will be dead in under a month. The system is off most of the time. At most it's on 3-4 hours per day, but unless I take the batteries out of the remote when the system is off, they drain really fast. The batteries in the remote paired to the PS3 last much, much longer than the ones for the XBMC remote.

I'm beginning to think that Ubuntu is not the best choice for a linux-based XBMC host. I've done what I can to get it to disable the update notification window, strip out all unnecessary software from the OS, office packages, email, browsers, games, Ubuntu One, Empathy, Gwibber, printing... I don't have much running at all, but I still get the strange pause with HD content. When it's doing it, my CPU and memory utilization are still really low, so there's not much going on.
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HD content hesitating, audio clipping and horrible battery life in bluetooth.0