[RELEASE] PseudoTV Addon: Virtual EPG and TV Channel Surfing Script

Hmm...I was having this same problem. I had three playlists, two "episode" types filled with random TV shows and one "movie" type set to "Comedy" genre. The movie playlist was Channel 2...and it would always freeze at 33%. I'm guessing that means it would freeze on that playlist. I removed it, leaving just the two episode playlists, and it's working fine. I'll try a few things and post a debug log if I can't figure out what's happening. [I took a quick look in the debug log, but I didn't see anything about the movie playlist.]

moontan77 Wrote:Its working fine for me on Ubuntu. Try with one simple smart list like this if you have movies:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="movies">
<name>Comedy Channel</name>
<match>all</match>
<rule field="genre" operator="is">Comedy</rule>
<limit>100</limit>
<order direction="ascending">random</order>
</smartplaylist>

That's exactly how I set mine up though I have it for episodes and reduced limit to 10 to see if it helps speeds things up. I only have the one channel setup.

@TheOddLinguist: You said you were able to get it working. Can I ask what oerating system you're using. I'm wondering, if you are using Ubuntu like Moontan is, whether the problem I'm seeing is OS related.

Just an update on my personal attempts to solve this...

If I make my errant movie playlist out of just movies, it seems to be okay. However, if I make a playlist of movies in sets, I get an error saying "Timeout waiting for video to start". Playing the playlist on its own, however, works just fine.

Sorry if none of this is helpful; I'm just so close. hehe

@Sranshaft: I'm currently running this on a Windows 7 32-bit machine.

Sranshaft Wrote:Okay, a quick update as to what is happening. The addon starts and displays the updating channel list. I can see the playlist is loaded and the first episode is loaded but paused. Pressing play starts the episode but with only audio. There is no video and the Updating Channel List dialog is still visible. Pressing stop changes the dialog text to View: List. Canceling the dialog has no effect and I have to force quit XBMC.

This is the exact behavior I experience.
I have windows 7 64-bit, XBMC RC2 if that helps.

I've tested this on Windows 7 as well as OS X, so I don't think it's OS specific.

@Sranshaft: Please get the newest stable-pre branch version from the repository, and then get the debug log. Thanks for helping me narrow this down.

@TheOddLinguist: What do you mean when you say "movies in sets"?

I don't know how this relates to the problems others are having, but to confirm my suspicion, I created a smart playlist that would include movies that are and aren't in sets; the add-on froze. When I removed the movies in sets, leaving a list of just movies, the channel was created successfully and the add-on loaded just fine.

I'll keep looking into it, I suppose...and I know that doesn't relate to the apparent issues some are having with episode playlists, but I thought I'd let you know.

@Jason102: I have some movies organized in sets so they show up together in the list. http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Movie_Sets

So, for instance, I have all the Harry Potter movies in a "Harry Potter" set. (...mostly so that it only takes up one space in my full Movies list) Then, I can click "Harry Potter", and I'm shown a new list of just the Harry Potter movies.

Thanks. As I have (obviously) not tested movie sets, stay away from them at the moment.