I know I should head to the XBMC forums with this question, but I figure I would start here to see if there's a simple solution.

 

My Zbox running XBMC Live has been working nearly flawlessly since I built it.  All of a sudden over the weekend SD files stopped playing correctly.  The audio will play fine, but the video will lag such that it is unwatchable.  The funny thing is that HD files (mostly 720p) continue to play flawlessly.  What could have happened?  I'm imagining something like an auto-update that borked some SD codecs?

 

Normally my first step would be to just reinstall XBMC Live, but I haven't had the time to do that yet.  Any simpler fix?

I've been running XBMC for a couple of years now, and I've never seen anything weird happen automagically. Any time it breaks, it's because I've messed around upgraded something  . Are you sure it even can auto-update? Any time I've updated, it's been manually, and frankly, I haven't seen any updates since December (svn35648), as they have currently turned off compiled nightly builds...

 

I would first point at your network, but since your HD content is not stuttering, my guesses would be:

 

• 1. Corrupted codec on the media player?
  
• 2. Is the SD content on a different drive then the HD content? If so, perhaps the drive is dying?
  

 

Maybe put some SD Content on a usb key and play it directly (taking the newtwork/unraid box out of the equation)...

 

[EDIT] Grammar

Hmmm, Mine plays flawlessly as well. Of course I'm running 9.11 or maybe even 9.4 LOL on my AsRock ION. Old as heck, but I'm to scared to update because my HDMI, old school Xbox remote works perfect and I haven't noticed any sync issues with my Plasma running the Linux version.

Hmm, that is an odd one. There would be nothing that would auto-update (other than add-ons but those wouldnt have any effect on your locally streamed files). If you take one of those files and move it locally onto your xbmc machine, do you see the same problem?

 

 

Also, if you end up going the reinstall route, take a look at openelec.

I'll try playing an SD file locally, thanks for the suggestion.

Rajahal,

  What ever came of this?  I'm having some stuttering problems myself.  Was it smoother locally?

The only time I've ever seen some studdering is when I've started a movie and stopped it. Later returned and resumed it. The file was in the drives buffer so it started right up, but then studdered as the drive spun up and the buffer ran out.

Rajahal,

  What ever came of this?  I'm having some stuttering problems myself.  Was it smoother locally?

 

I ended up just reinstalling XBMC instead of doing any further testing.  I'm now running OpenELEC, and it works pretty well.  I haven't seen this particular issue again.