January 11, 201016 yr I'll revert to 4.5 beta11 and post the results. Edit: I can't find 4.5beta11 to download it. I'll try put it on my ftp site later. In the mean time, try to find out whether the XBMC playback buffer is tuneable.
January 12, 201016 yr In the mean time, try to find out whether the XBMC playback buffer is tuneable. I'd like to know that too. I've posted this in another thread but I've also seen this behaviour most prominently with the latest xbmc release. However it's always been when the unraid server is under some kind of load (torrenting, parity check, mover script etc). I can't reproduce it at will however and for the past week or so I havn't seen the issue at all.
January 12, 201016 yr It is not tunable. There is an urban myth where people thought it was but it was only ever tunable in the XBOX build and even then it only worked for certain things. The actual reason why not is complicated beyond what i understand about how videos are decoded. When it was removed from teh GUI lots of people posted saying they needed it and when they turned it up to max it helped them. This only served to highlight how unreliable some feedback is. I believe it is being looked at though but its not as simple as it sounds apparently.
January 12, 201016 yr It is not tunable. There is an urban myth where people thought it was but it was only ever tunable in the XBOX build and even then it only worked for certain things. The actual reason why not is complicated beyond what i understand about how videos are decoded. When it was removed from teh GUI lots of people posted saying they needed it and when they turned it up to max it helped them. This only served to highlight how unreliable some feedback is. I believe it is being looked at though but its not as simple as it sounds apparently. Do you have links to the explanations? Many other players manage it and in my head it would be simple to read ahead a file into a memory buffer and start playback from there. Keep reading ahead the file in increments in the background to keep the buffer filled. I'm not arguing your point - I'd be interested to see what I'm missing about the implementation. I would have sworn this did used to be a working tweakable on the original xbox builds as I used to run it via a very ropey wireless link and raising the buffer was the only way to get any sort of consistent playback. XBMC is a very different beast these days though!
January 12, 201016 yr Good to know I'm not quite senile! http://xbmc.org/forum/showpost.php?p=379920&postcount=2 I wonder why that is..interesting..
January 12, 201016 yr One of the devs did it explain it to me on IRC once but it was way about my head. Something to do with the differences between frames and slices and magic fairy dust. I know things are afoot though with this so don't lose hope FYI a number of users found the actual problem was using non optimised/generic Ethernet drivers. YMMV on that one. I have been lucky in so far as i never have issues even though a utter crap 100mbit switch.
January 12, 201016 yr I'd primarily be interested as I could ditch the hardwired gigabit connection to the lounge and switch to using a more convenient powerline / homeplug link. It's not up to streaming blu rays at the moment but with a 5-10 second buffer in place it would be fine.
January 12, 201016 yr If its any consolation, I switched to NFS on xbmc and have not had issues... The only problem is that I have Vista Premium on my workstation/ripper so MS nfs tools cannot be installed/used (only ultimate and enterprise versions have this). So... if I upload a movie via smb, the NFS share is not updated and XBMC will not see the new content until rebooted or the NFS mount is umounted and remounted (well there is a way but it blows away sudo security essentially).... I did create a python script in xbmc attached to a remote key to unmount the NFS share, remount then run a "scan for new content" on the library. A bit of a work around but working great. Scripting mount commands is sort of a pain because sudo rights are needed... if anyone has any interest let me know and I will post my method.
January 13, 201016 yr Author Looks like my existing mobo was having some issues. I couldn't get it to power up after a recent shutdown. I've switched to a SuperMicro C2SEA. I'll try smb sharing again and see what happens. Edit: Playback stopped after 13:50.
January 13, 201016 yr Edit: Playback stopped after 13:50. Doesn't surprise me... if it was a nic thing, I would suspect this issue would be more random. Its got to be a smb.conf setting or version (either on ubuntu or unraid) incompatibility. Have your tried a mounted drive vs smb:// in xbmc? You could mount the SMB drive to your home dir somewhere to test. I know my crashes were with smb:// NFS seems to work... a few hours of BSG last night. I even paused for 20 min or so without issue.
January 13, 201016 yr If it helps any, I put XBMC on my Vista laptop (not the live version, but the latest SVN version) and I've been setting up its "library" mode. I've played several movies through to their ends from my unRAID server. XBMC does freeze while unRAID disks spin up if I click on a movie where the disk is currently sleeping, but I like it a whole lot. As you said, it is probably a SAMBA issue on the one of the OS. Since I'm using SAMBA user-shares on unRAID from the Vista laptop, it might just be a "XBMC live" issue. Joe L.
January 14, 201016 yr Author Have your tried a mounted drive vs smb:// in xbmc? You could mount the SMB drive to your home dir somewhere to test. I know my crashes were with smb:// NFS seems to work... a few hours of BSG last night. I even paused for 20 min or so without issue. I would like to try that, but I have no idea how to set up a mounted drive or nfs using xbmc live.
January 14, 201016 yr I have Revo 330 with XBMC live 9.11 and I do experience playing movies and it stop in the middle of the movie (it is random though but its not happening to me often). I am using MOCA connection so I thought this is what causing that problem. I also want to know how to setup NFS if this help my problem.
January 14, 201016 yr FWIW, I'm not having any problems. I'm running XBMCLive Camelot on a Zotac IONITX-F-E and unraid 4.5 final on a Intel DQ45EK MB. The network is full 1000 and I have a local DNS server. All unraid shares are the std, SMB. XBMCLive is installed to a SSD on my client. I play DVD and Bluray (m2ts) files from the unraid share.
January 15, 201016 yr Author FWIW, I'm not having any problems. I'm running XBMCLive Camelot on a Zotac IONITX-F-E and unraid 4.5 final on a Intel DQ45EK MB. The network is full 1000 and I have a local DNS server. All unraid shares are the std, SMB. XBMCLive is installed to a SSD on my client. I play DVD and Bluray (m2ts) files from the unraid share. I think the problem is with *.mkv files. I haven't tried streaming m2ts, but I will to see if the problem exists for that container.
January 15, 201016 yr OK some more info... I have read some other things to look at from the xbmc forums. Can't remember if they are true or not in may case... 1. Mounted shares seem to not have a problem (vs smb://) 2. As Wooten said possibly mkv? I am pretty sure my crashes were playing 1080 mkv. Don't think I tested DVDs and for sure not m2ts. NFS support in XBMC. I apologize that I cannot give full instructions. Seems most of you are using the Live version, which I do not use. I use XBMC on a full installation of Ubuntu. So these were the steps I had to perform on my HTPC. I assume since you are using live it may be a little bit trickier since I do not know what is installed by default. 1. First you have to at least get to a terminal. From what I have read putty and SSH should be able to do this for you on LIVE. 2. Install NFS client: sudo apt-get install portmap nfs-common (needs password again not sure what this is on Live) 3. Create folder to mount: mkdir /home/%USER%/%FOLDERNAME% (you can also put in any folder in your home dir like Video, Documents etc Linux is case sensitive in these commands... 4. Manually mount/test: sudo mount %NAME_IP_OF_SERVER%:/mnt/user/%USERSHARE_UNRAID_NAME% /home/%USER%/%FOLDERNAME% nfs rw,hard,intr 5. If that works edit fstab file so the above mount at boot: sudo gedit /etc/fstab 6. add the following to fstab: %NAME_IP_OF_SERVER%:/mnt/user/%USERSHARE_UNRAID_NAME% /home/%USER%/%FOLDERNAME% nfs rw,hard,intr The mounting technique is not that much different for SMB which you could also try... I know the commands are slightly different so you will have to look them to to try...
January 15, 201016 yr Author I tried streaming 3 *.m2ts files this morning and all 3 played from start to finish. Looks like the issue is with *.mkv files. Thanks dandirk for the instructions, I'm going to give that a try.
January 15, 201016 yr I tried streaming 3 *.m2ts files this morning and all 3 played from start to finish. Looks like the issue is with *.mkv files. Thanks dandirk for the instructions, I'm going to give that a try. I wouldn't be so sure : a) there is an issue yet. I can't reproduce it at will at all. It's entirely random and there are far too many factors going on that could cause it to happen outwith xbmc's samba interface and unraid. It also hasn't happened to me for about two weeks now whilst it was chronic for a period. b) I've had it occur on xvid .avi's as well as .mkv.
January 15, 201016 yr Author OK some more info... I have read some other things to look at from the xbmc forums. Can't remember if they are true or not in may case... 1. Mounted shares seem to not have a problem (vs smb://) 2. As Wooten said possibly mkv? I am pretty sure my crashes were playing 1080 mkv. Don't think I tested DVDs and for sure not m2ts. NFS support in XBMC. I apologize that I cannot give full instructions. Seems most of you are using the Live version, which I do not use. I use XBMC on a full installation of Ubuntu. So these were the steps I had to perform on my HTPC. I assume since you are using live it may be a little bit trickier since I do not know what is installed by default. 1. First you have to at least get to a terminal. From what I have read putty and SSH should be able to do this for you on LIVE. 2. Install NFS client: sudo apt-get install portmap nfs-common (needs password again not sure what this is on Live) 3. Create folder to mount: mkdir /home/%USER%/%FOLDERNAME% (you can also put in any folder in your home dir like Video, Documents etc Linux is case sensitive in these commands... 4. Manually mount/test: sudo mount %NAME_IP_OF_SERVER%:/mnt/user/%USERSHARE_UNRAID_NAME% /home/%USER%/%FOLDERNAME% nfs rw,hard,intr 5. If that works edit fstab file so the above mount at boot: sudo gedit /etc/fstab 6. add the following to fstab: %NAME_IP_OF_SERVER%:/mnt/user/%USERSHARE_UNRAID_NAME% /home/%USER%/%FOLDERNAME% nfs rw,hard,intr The mounting technique is not that much different for SMB which you could also try... I know the commands are slightly different so you will have to look them to to try... I tried and I coulnd't get past step 2. E: Couldn't find package portmap OK, I got it to work after running an apt-get update. I didn't get the mount to work until a tried this: mount -t nfs %NAME_IP_OF_SERVER%:/mnt/user/%USERSHARE_UNRAID_NAME% /home/%USER%/%FOLDERNAME%
January 17, 201016 yr Author NFS seems to work great. I've played seven movies start to finish. SMB also seems to be working great when mounted.
January 18, 201016 yr The mount -t nfs command could be write... I just worked with running fstab in my tests aka mount -a.... So it doesn't surprise me... Glad you could get it to work! I will have to try the mounted smb share... would be nice not to have to run nfs which causes some other complications in my setup.
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