[jgora]

Hi guys,

Suddenly my XBMC just seems to be dying on me! No changes made to anything, have been adding movies as normal and now all of a sudden the movies start skipping and in some instances the freeze part is waaay longer than the play part so its like you're watching one frame for like 10 seconds. Naturally because of this there is no audio.

Initially i thought my 1TB external hard drive must have failed being on all the time - so I tried playing the same movie file with VLC player and tada - it worked fine! Just to be 110% certain I copied the film to the internal drive maybe if there was a lag in the USB 2.0 connection - but that didn't solve the problem.

The specs for my HTPC are as follows: -

Model: HP Compaq dc7800 Small Form Factor
Processor: Intel® Pentium® Dual CPU E2160 @ 1.80GHz 1.80GHz
Memory(RAM): 4.00GB
System Type: 32-bit Operating System
Video: NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT
Audio: ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim Audio Device


One thing I forgot to mention earlier is that it seems to run TV Shows fine, it just seems to be movies etc. Earlier it seemed to have a problem handling 1080 films so I assigned it a higher priority in terms of processing power from task manager and that seemed to fix the problem. But here none of that seems to be working!

Anyone?? Please help?


Thanks
Jay

[kraqh3d]

OS is Windows? And always provide a debug log capturing the problem. Play both a working TV show, and a non-working movie for comparison. (Use pastebin to host the log, and post a link here.)

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Log_file

[jgora]

thanks for the reply! yes OS is windows vista (unfortunately)

TV show log file: http://pastebin.com/ZNQJDxDc

HD Film log file: http://pastebin.com/gA1yAs7N

Its so annoying how its so temperamental!!! :mad:

[kraqh3d]

You didnt read my link carefully enough... you need to produce a debug log.

[jgora]

apologies - will get the debug logs straight away!

[jgora]

TV Shows - http://pastebin.com/UVPcsaZ1

HD Films - http://pastebin.com/PjDYPc9t

The HD film one seems to be insanely long - apologies in advance if i've made a mistake!

[jgora]

just wondering if any updates on the situation above? problem still exists


just found out that it is ONLY HD films and HD TV shows that are causing the issue...normal divx seem to be working fine - though hd films are on an external while divx are on internal

i don't know what went wrong - it seemed to be working fine before i first posted this and suddenly it decided to stop working!! - i think xbmc still has too many problems!!!!!

[joshuass]

Watch the CPU usage during playback of the offending video files. Is it dropping frames? Have you had problems playing HD content? It just seems that the Pentium you have might be at the very edge of what is considered to be capable of playing back HD content. Its a dual core, so you have that much. When you said you had to give it a higher priority, that's when I started suspecting the system just can't cope with higher bitrate content.

[jgora]

Watch the CPU usage during playback of the offending video files. Is it dropping frames? Have you had problems playing HD content? It just seems that the Pentium you have might be at the very edge of what is considered to be capable of playing back HD content. Its a dual core, so you have that much. When you said you had to give it a higher priority, that's when I started suspecting the system just can't cope with higher bitrate content.

the cpu usage is around 23% nowhere near high enough for it to be skipping/stuttering.

what do you mean by dropping frames?

never had any problems playing HD content a week ago! it only suddenly kicked up!

[jgora]

*bump*

[joshuass]

Well, you said this problem is only with HD content, but now you say you were able to play this content with no problems before?

By dropping frames, I mean that XBMC is not decoding some frames of video in order to maintain sync with audio and general playback. If this is occurring its a sign that the CPU does not have enough horsepower to decode the video. You will see a counter in the status screen (pushing "O" during video playback) that counts the number of dropped frames. Typically you'll see that its not zero (XBMC usually drops like 1-10 frames when starting playback).

I also see a ton of dropped packets in your debug log for the movies. Not sure what that means ultimately, maybe a dev can chime in on the meaning of that debug notification?