Hey all. I'm a long time XBMC user and have multiple installs throughout our house. Since I've moved to Gotham on my Windows 7 box (Acer Revo) and on my ATV2 I've had nothing but trouble playing mkv movies. I'm more concerned with my Windows 7 box as it is the main system we use. Almost everytime I try to play a movie xbmc will freeze or play without audio or both. It can take ten to twenty seconds to stop a movie at times and when I try to exit XBMC all I get is a black screen. I have to ctrl-alt-del to bring up task manager and "End Task". I've even started using VLC to play the movies, which it does without any issue.
I haven't had time to fool with the system but before I do I was wondering if anyone else had any issues similar to these.
Definitely not. Post a debug log of it breaking. The Windows version is often one of the smoothest, so if there are problems, we'd love to know more about them.
Before you got too much further, you might want to make the jump to Kodi Helix in beta now, might fix what ails and leap you ahead in builds.
ATV2 issue might be that we seem to use a little more RAM in v13, and the ATV2 is fairly starved at only 256MB of RAM already.
One thing to check is that on your windows machine you are using WASAPI for the audio output. I had issues on my Revo with Direct Sound which causes this type of playback behaviour. Once changed over all was good.
After I posted the above post I went through the computer. There were 4 outstanding Windows updates (nothing that seemed relevant to this issue) that I applied and then rebooted the computer.
I then ran XBMC and turned on Debugging. I immediately tried the movie I previously had trouble with and it ran as smooth as silk. I also tried the item I tried earlier the evening to see if it worked and it was perfect as well.
We watched another movie on Saturday night without any issue and started a second movie, again, flawless.
I'll keep an eye on it and as soon as I hit something that gives me an issue I'll grab some debugging info. Is the a keypress I can use to turn on debugging without going into the XBMC settings?
Also, should I go ahead and upgrade to Helix Beta? I like having this stable for the wife and kids.
There is no key press to turn on debugging, but you can set silent mode in advancedsettings.xml
(check the wiki for flags) which should eliminate the visual onscreen display.
If you have everything working fine with Gotham, don't fix which isn't broke...wait for the stable update.
XBMC has been running since Saturday night. I watched a TV show last night (Monday night) without any issue. (This is where the attached pastebin starts)
Tonight I attempted to watch another TV show and it wouldn't play properly at all. No sound and maybe 1 frame per 30 seconds would show. I hit stop, turned on debugging mode, and went back to try the show again. Same result. I then attempted to exit XBMC but only got a black screen. | hit ctrl-alt-del and brought up the task manager and rebooted my computer. After that we ran XBMC again and everything was fine.
Debug Log
Thanks for any help!