[Rachel]

To celebrate the first new Radiohead album to come out since I started using xbmc I tried playing it. The original WAVs play fine (am listening now), but earlier I'd converted them into Apple Lossless as it's possible to tag those properly, but xbmc refuses to play those. No error message, just a lack of any playback happening.

These files were suffixes (by iTunes) as .m4a; same as Apple's aac files. So I went to try playing some other material in .m4a (no DRM, ripped from CD), and xbmc couldn't play those either.

Google pointed me at some discussion threads about xbmc not playing these files, but they all seem to date from 2005. And looking here: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBM...io_codecs: does list both .m4a and Apple Lossless among the supported codecs.

Wha's happening? :-)

This is xbmc stable on ubuntu lucid; specifically xbmc 10.00~svn35648-lucid1 on ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS on an Acer Revo. And it plays AAC tracks in videos just fine. :-)

[Rachel]

Update; I looked at xbmc.log :-)

Code:

21:21:00 T:2871741296 M:1415843840 WARNING: FillBuffer: curl failed with code 18
21:21:00 T:2871741296 M:1415843840   ERROR: CFileCurl::CReadState::Open, didn't get any data from stream.
21:21:00 T:2871741296 M:1414135808 WARNING: FillBuffer: curl failed with code 18
21:21:00 T:2871741296 M:1414037504   ERROR: CFileCurl::CReadState::Open, didn't get any data from stream.
21:21:00 T:3054626688 M:1411952640   ERROR: MP3Codec: Unable to determine file format of http://mab.local/Vault/Music/Radiohead/The%20King%20Of%20Limbs/01%20Bloom.m4a (corrupt start of mp3?)
21:21:00 T:3054626688 M:1417269248   ERROR: CAudioDecoder: Unable to Init Codec while loading file http://mab.local/Vault/Music/Radiohead/The%20King%20Of%20Limbs/01%20Bloom.m4a
21:21:00 T:3054626688 M:1417269248   ERROR: Playlist Player: skipping unplayable item: 0, path [http://mab.local/Vault/Music/Radiohead/The%20King%20Of%20Limbs/01%20Bloom.m4a]

Streaming that file using another client works fine (specifically Safari on an iPad, just browsing to and clicking on the file, the music plays).

Downloading that file to the xbmc box using curl works, and XBMC plays the downloaded file just fine. (So it's demonstrated XBMC itself is OK with this file format; apple lossless in a .m4a file.)

Code 18 is apparently a 'partial content' error; ie: the webserver (btw, is bog-standard ubuntu apache2) apparently lying about the size of the data it's about to deliver.

But anything else, including curl on the commandline, can read it fine. And XBMC seems fine with all other files.

I have no clue what's going on here. Anyone? :-)

EDIT: Confirmed using wget that:
a: The content-type given is audio/mpeg
b: The file size given is the exact size of the file

[Rachel]

Worked around it for myself by using NFS instead of HTTP, remembering that I still had an autofs/nfs connection to my vault set up although for misc performance reasons ended up preferring HTTP for HD video. But this is fine for audio.

Be nice to know what's up with .m4a files over HTTP though,as NFS may not always be an option

[williamlondon]

Just discovered same problem here with XBMC on ATV1. Streaming the file (.M4A Apple lossless) via SMB didn't work, but copying the same file locally the file plays great.

Any ideas what the problem could be?