[fdac]

Hi,

I'm new to XBMC but a reasonably experienced Linux user. I have installed XBMC on a spare laptop (Thinkpad T60 - 1.83 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM) running on Arch Linux.

I want the laptop to function mainly as a music player and to continuously display digital photos from my collection. Music is mainly FLAC and MP3 files. Images are run as a screensaver slideshow and are high resolution JPGs (from a Nikon DSLR). All music and images are stored on a separate server and accessed by NFS over my home wireless network.

The problems: When music is playing and the screensaver kicks in, both the music and the images have problems.

1) The music becomes distorted or 'clipped' sounding, I suspect the player is skipping samples. This happens for several seconds, every time the slideshow changes to a new photo.

2) Image transitions are not clean, I get ugly block artifacts during the fade transition. The artifacts seem to be attached to the 'old' image and fade away with the old image as the new one fades in.

Possible causes I can think of:
CPU / hardware not up to the task (seems unlikely?)
Issue with file transfer over the wireless connection
Configuration problems with Linux or XBMC

Any ideas or help?! I'm keen to use XBMC for this but it's not working well enough at the moment.

Thanks

[htpc guy]

Is it possible to use a wired connection? This would at least narrow down your search.

[fdac]

Good point.

I did try it with a wired ethernet connection and the problems persisted. The audio distortion maybe seemed less severe, but the picture artifacts are the same.

I suspect the picture issue is not related to file transfer speeds.

Is there a way to log CPU and memory usage during screensaver periods? I tried to use top in a separate TTY but wasn't sure whether the xbmc screensaver was continuing. CPU usage with music playing was typically about 3% or less.

[fdac]

OK - not a network problem. Same issues on 100 Mb Ethernet connection.

Running XMBC in a window, from a terminal, I can see a heap of sound buffer underrun notifications.

With top running in a separate window I can see spikes in CPU usage, up to 100% sometimes.

Hmm. Is there something strange going on here?