no video found in file path?

Hi artrafael!

UPDATE: While I was writing this I came upon a workaround for this, read on to the end for details.

Anyway, there is no permission issue, the server and client are both Linux and I had already ran;

find . -exec chown myname:myname {} \;

and the same again with chmod 755 on the entire video tree just in case anyway.

I can assure you that all the files have exact same permissions as every other file on the server.

As I said, If I copy another video file, from a different TV series to the same folder and name it exactly the same as one of the borked ones xbmc sees it and will play it fine. It is absolutely something to do with the encoding or packaging.

I have 2 series that don't work. I didn't encode them myself.

Both of them have single audio tracks(mp3 480000Hz 112kbps) and no subtitles.

They also both have a single video track although one of them is XVID MPEG-4 30fps 416x304 and the other is DivX MPEG-4 Version 4 24fps 624x352

I have many other files with very similar characteristics though so I cannot for the life of me figure out what makes this set of files any different.

So, as an experiment I took one of the "invisible" files and renamed it to .mkv and tried updating the library.

Nothing.

Next, I took same file, but ran it through mkvmerge, thereby repackaging it properly from .avi to .mkv. I did NOT transcode the a/v streams.

Tried updating the library again and bingo, it worked! I cannot explain why. I have plenty of mp3/xvid packaged in avi's that work fine, and the "broken" avi's work fine in every other player I've thrown them at so it's got me stumped.

I guess I'll just have to go and repackage the 300 or so files that are affected. I'll need to script it but at least I don't have to transcode the streams I guess.

So, I figured out the issue. It seems that the filenames for the misbehaving videos had a trailing space which was stopping xbmc from recognising them as avi files.

You couldn't see that the space was there when doing an "ls" (i.e. "dir" on Windows) or when browsing in nautilus (i.e. "explorer" on Windows) because the offending space was effectively invisible.

It took me a while to cotton on to what was happening, but I got there in the end.

You gotta love those wacky problems!