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jsun311 · 2011-02-03, 23:56

First, thanks to everyone in the XBMC community - I have been a long time fan. Second, I have read FAQ's, known issues etc.. However, I cannot find a solution for the problem I am having so here we go (if I over looked something I do apologize in advance). I have a Apple TV2 jail-broken with Seas0n Pass, brand spanking new Macbook Pro, Windows Vista box all connected on a wireless N router. I installed XBMC 10.0 and installation was a breeze as was setting up SMB shares from my Mac and Windows machines. I have tried playing almost every file type I could find (divx/xvid/x264/mkv) and some error out right off the bat and some begin to stream and then buffer non-stop. I have uninstalled and reinstalled; even installed the "unofficial" releases with the hopes of streaming some movies. I thought it must be network related so on a whim I installed PLEX which played all of the files with only a 5 second buffer once or twice a movie, if at all. So my question is why? I would much rather run XBMC instead of PLEX but at this point its the only thing working for me. If anyone has any ideas I would be very thankful for your insight.

davilla · 2011-02-04, 00:00

turn off thumb gen

jsun311 · 2011-02-04, 01:01

Worked. Thank you very much.

kevron · 2011-02-04, 01:35

am I the only one that this doesn't work for? I have turned off every sort of thumb gen I can.. still every 28seconds it stops to buffer. I have found 1 out of 150 movies that only buffers an hour in.

chad473 · (This post was last modified: 2011-02-04, 02:41 by chad473.)

I still have buffering issues. the 2/1/11 nightly build helps, but there are still buffering times in files that play fine to other devices. I would imagine it will continue improving but there seems to be some sort of bottleneck or too little buffer that makes it sensitive to network hiccups. There's been some pretty great progress in a short amount of time already.

bring up the codec info screen (not sure if/how you can do it on the remote, but in the XBMC iphone remote app you can open the keyboard and send O). This will tell you if the cpu is getting maxed out indicating a decoding problem. xvid doesn't have hardware decoding so anything above SD could cause problems.

TiGmsm · 2011-02-04, 02:43

davilla Wrote:turn off thumb gen

Where is this setting?

I'm a newbie a nd as much as I'm enjoying XBMC, this is is greatly lowering the WAF.

r6danl · 2011-02-04, 02:45

Use the "top" command to see what processes take up the most resources.

Code:
First you need to install "top" by running the following:

apt-get top

Then just type "top" without the quotes and hit enter to see all processes(command+c to stop the process).

Hope this helps.

kevron · 2011-02-04, 02:53

danmedhurst Wrote:System > Video > File Lists > Extract thumbnails and video information

Turn that off.

Try that.

jsun311 · 2011-02-04, 03:17

Turning off thumb gen made XBMC functional for me; it is streaming video so it does on occasion have a slight buffer. I am an hour into The Town and it looks great!

**bossanova808** · (This post was last modified: 2011-02-04, 07:04 by bossanova808.)

Try streaming with NFS rather than SMB for even better performance on lower quality networks.

(Just general XBMC advice, I am not sure about this working with the ATV2)

akpak · 2011-02-04, 07:52

I'm having the same problem with some files. Turning off thumbnail gen helped a little (now buffering every 28 sec instead of every 10)

Any other ideas, gang?

chad473 · 2011-02-04, 08:15

bossanova808 Wrote:Try streaming with NFS rather than SMB for even better performance on lower quality networks.

(Just general XBMC advice, I am not sure about this working with the ATV2)

apparently this doesn't work, unfortunately.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=91776

The more I've been reading the more it seems smb is the culprit for my streaming issues.

chad473 · (This post was last modified: 2011-02-04, 09:05 by chad473.)

akpak Wrote:I'm having the same problem with some files. Turning off thumbnail gen helped a little (now buffering every 28 sec instead of every 10)

Any other ideas, gang?

you can try via upnp. the downside is you need a server running (tversity, ps3mediaserver) on the host machine. I have a bit better luck with that. The bizarre thing is that it helps with high bitrate mkv's, but actually makes one of my SD xvid's buffer even worse. I can't make any rhyme or reason out of it.

Kaiserlein · 2011-02-04, 11:53

UPNP ist (most of the time) slower and more unreliable.

Are you connected through WIFI or ethernet ?

It seems XBMC does not recognize the WIFI signal perfectly and is not buffering enough.
Hooking up an ethernet cable worked with the hiccups for me.