ATV frequently unresponsive during playback

[reddeath]

I am a usual user of CB1 on ATV 1 with CrystalHDx15 card. After I saw news about OE 3.0, I decided to try it out. Running from USB 3.0 stick, same as CB1, I was excited about having the latest XBMC available. However, very soon I found that playback as well as sometimes directory traversal is frequently freezing, from several seconds up to 1-3 minutes. There is no message during video freeze, i.e. seeking or buffering, which makes it very strange. Also many times the playback OSD can be shown and hidden, while the back button to exit playback has no effect.

I cannot pinpoint the reason for freezing.
- It might be that there are encoding errors in video files, which are handled correctly in CB1 and on PC, but not on OE.
- My other suspicion is that the network streaming is sub-optimal, comparing to CB1. I play files from Synology x86 NAS over WIFI (5Ghz dual band) and it plays fine on CB1. On OE 3.0 I tried both SMB and NFS with same result of intermittent freezing.
- Maybe the support for CrystalHDx15 is buggy.

On another note, I would like to point out my subjective impression that the video quality is actually lower, comparing to CB1.

I hope that the issues will be addressed by developers, and appropriate fixes will be implemented soon, so that I can permanently switch to OE. Until then it is back to CB1 for me.

[Mforcer]

What is in your log file when experiencing the unresponsivness?

As a complete guess, could the freezing occur because of issues with your thumbnails? Where are your thumbnails stored? I believe the latest XBMC no longer supports saving them anywhere but on the local system drive. I rebuilt all my thumbnails which used to be stored on my NAS.

[reddeath]

How can thumbnails be related to video playback stopping? I haven't done any kind of settings in XBMC related to thumbnails on my fresh OE 3.0 installation. I use Media companion for movie info crapping, which includes posters, fanart, etc.
I don't know what is in the logs, because I did not know where to look for them. At the moment I am back to CB1, because the freezing was unbearable.

[Mforcer]

It was just an uneducated guess that the aTV could be tied up processing new thumbnails on your NAS which was reducing its ability to process the movies.

[reddeath]

You mean there is an automatic process which creates thumbnails for all movies in the added file share, and it is doing so during movie playback? And this is enabled by default in OpenElec 3.0?

[chewitt]

There *are* processes like that and they are running in all instances of XBMC 12.0; nothing specific to OE. If you enable debug logging you'll see thumbnails being created while you navigate around regardless of what media manager you're using. One of the ways I can provoke a boatload of bad behaviours is navigating to a folder that contains killa.sampla .. locks the box up good and proper while figuring out a thumbnail

[Mforcer]

I believe there was a change in the way XMBC handled thumbnails in the latest versions. When I originally set up my NAS with MySQL I also stored thumbnails on the NAS but this is not recommended in the latest versions. I don't know what would be the consequence of storing thumbnails on the NAS.

[reddeath]

OK, what do you mean exactly by thumbnails? The *.tbn and folder.jpg files? Or the corresponding files stored in local XBMC database for files which do not have these generated by Media Companion?
In any case, is it safe to assume that after 10-20 hours all thumbnails would be generated, and no subsequent freezing related to generation should take place? If so, then I don't think the problem is with thumbnails.

Please let me know where can I find the specific logs for this issue?

[reddeath]

Forgot to add that I did not enable any scraping in XBMC. I simply added a file share without setting content type. I only rely on Media Companion for info scrapping and fan art.

[pabloscotty]

Hello. I have the same problem since I've instaled openelec on my apple TV. Every time I stream movie from my imac via samba or afp XBMC Freezes for a minute or so. I've tried every beta and even after 3.0 it still freezes playback. Yesterday i've tried uPnP but there is problem with srt subtitles. I realy like Openelec but networking is realy big problem here.');