Broken thumbnails for AVCHD(mts)?

Hi -

New user here. Just installed the alpha2 release on a new Karmic Kubuntu ION system. I'm blown away by how slick XBMC is and how perfectly my AVCHD home videos play. The only issue that I've encountered is that XBMC seems to be having trouble generating thumbnails for my AVCHD movies. For my MKV DVD rips, it looks like it just picks a random frame out of the stream - I assume that it is trying to do the same for my AVCHD files, but is failing for whatever reason. 90% of my movies just show a gray rectangle and the other 10% do show a frame from my video, but it looks very garbled. Does anyone know if this is expected behavior?

Anyways - this is just a small nit on an otherwise fabulous user experience. I don't know why I waited so long to try XBMC...

jay_cee Wrote:Hi -

New user here. Just installed the alpha2 release on a new Karmic Kubuntu ION system. I'm blown away by how slick XBMC is and how perfectly my AVCHD home videos play. The only issue that I've encountered is that XBMC seems to be having trouble generating thumbnails for my AVCHD movies. For my MKV DVD rips, it looks like it just picks a random frame out of the stream - I assume that it is trying to do the same for my AVCHD files, but is failing for whatever reason. 90% of my movies just show a gray rectangle and the other 10% do show a frame from my video, but it looks very garbled. Does anyone know if this is expected behavior?

Anyways - this is just a small nit on an otherwise fabulous user experience. I don't know why I waited so long to try XBMC...

Known problem with some video formats, ffmpeg does not like to jump into the middle and decode a single frame for these formats.

Thanks...I was guessing its something like that.

davilla Wrote:Known problem with some video formats, ffmpeg does not like to jump into the middle and decode a single frame for these formats.

Is this still a known/unresolved issue? I get the gray rectangle on about 95% of files recorded with the HDPVR. It's strange that some of them work but not all.

elupus made a change to the thumb extractor that went in in time for beta2 - not sure whether it will make any difference here or not. Beta 2 will be available for download later today.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Awesome, I will give it a try and report back

Most of the HDPVR files work fine now (at first glance the only ones that aren't working are older files recorded when there was problem with the HDPVR drivers on Windows, those files were problematic with just about any program even for payback, so I think the XBMC thumbnail problem is solved), but nearly all of the 1080i MPEG2 files from the HDHomerun have the gray rectangle problem now. I'll work on getting a debug log and try to produce some reasonably sized sample files for testing.

I just wanted to point out that this is still busted (for me at least) on Dharma.

It's really a pretty big bummer. I came back from Christmas vacation last week with over 70 AVCHD clips from my Canon HD camcorder and none of them have thumbnails. It makes sorting through them very difficult.

Regards - J

I too am experiencing the same thing as Jay-cee. All my home movies (with .MTS extension) just have the generic icon.

Funny thing is, I thought this was working at one time recently.

Will this show up as an error in the debug log that would be helpful to anyone if I retrieved it?

I am running XBMC-Live (Installed)
To be more specific: XBMC 10.0 r35648 (Compiled Dec 17, 2010)

this issue seems to have popped up again. all of my .mts files were generating thumbs correctly for a long time, but after upgrading to Eden, it's back to grey rectangles for .mts thumbnails.

did something change back?