[fly2thesun]

I'm afraid that my use case may not be that typical as I don't see any report about slideshow in this forum. But I'd like to report what I feel is rather weird.

I use slideshow quite often to play vids and pics of our family events/travels/babies. Each folder in the NAS (WD Mybook world edition) has a mixture of photos and videos (each folder has a few hundred files) , and is shared via SMB & wired ethernet. I add the folders as picture sources, and enable "Show video files in the listings". Then I start a slideshow in a desired folder. This slideshow runs through both video and picture files. But this slideshow feels a little weird when it has to show a video after a picture.

Let's say picture A is finished and the next one is video B. As is often the case for large folders, a rotating sign shows up saying "Working" for a few (5~10) seconds before this video B begins playing. But right before B begins playing, another picture C appears on the screen for a second or two. Then video B plays.. After video B is finished playing, picture C appears again for 5~6 seconds.

But this is just a typical behavior, and there's some variation to it. Sometimes video file B plays only sound with no video (while the screen shows picture C, or even next picture D ). Sometimes ( not so often, hard to reproduce ) XBMC just crashes.

I uploaded part of the xbmc.log to
http://pastebin.com/gJam5frB

ATV2 OS version is 8F305.
XBMC build is xbmc-20111007-e330173-master-atv2.deb
Skin is Confluence.

Looking at the log, it seems that there's some background pre-loading, which probably is a feature not a bug.. But the sequence seems rather weird, such as
1) BABY_1809.jpg seems to get loaded 3 times, before and after other video files

2) BABY_1647.MOV seems to get loaded twice.
Around 11:15:26 ( this seems before BABY_1644.MOV starts playing)
And then
Around 11:16:13 ( this seems after BABY_1644.MOV finished playing )

3) Both BABY_1644.MOV and BABY_1647.MOV wastes a lot of time while trying to "load", each time generating hundreds of same repeated debug messages. ( For example, 11:15:17 to 11:15:23.., 11:15:26 to 11:15:31, and 11:16:13 to 11:16:20 )

I didn't check the logs for previous XBMC versions, but at least behaviorally all the nightlies at least since August behave the same way. On the other hand, official build 10.0-7 behaved much more straightforward. Just one file at a time, at least apparently to the user.

[fly2thesun]

I think there is a bug in the implementation of this feature. It is closely related to another issue, which I and a few others reported ( http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=108773 ), where there's a long startup delay for video files in a large folder.

The buggy behavior happens when the slideshow tries to play a video file.

Before the play starts, XBMC on ATV2 spends several seconds scanning for external subtitles. ( It can be quite long, depending on share protocol and folder size, apparently because XBMC is opening the current folder again over the network, rather than using cached info)

When this delay is longer than the slideshow interval, the next slide shows up, without waiting for the current video to start. ( Another quirk is that during this delay, XBMC doesn't respond to remote. )

With roughly 90% probability, the video file plays okay when ScanForExternalSubtitles finishes. But for the rest 10% cases, it seems that the current video file and the next picture want to start at the same time, confusing XBMC and resulting in a weird state where the audio of the current video file is played while the screen shows the next picture.

And after seeing such weird behaviors multiple times, something eventually triggers XBMC to crash. Below are the CrashReporter plist (Low Memory) and xbmc.log, for a crash that happened on 11-25-18:47:53. ( xbmc.log stops at 18:47:45. ). This time using 20111123-e86e4f4 build on AppleTV2 4.4.3.

/var/logs/CrashReporter/LowMemory-2011-11-25-184753.plist
http://pastebin.com/zkcwu1yC

XBMC.log
http://pastebin.com/hJh5szN0

A few things that come to my mind for avoiding this are
1) option to skip ScanForExternalSubtitles
2) ScanForExternalSubtitles to use cached info
3) Next slide to wait until the current slide (video) is properly started and finished. ( I am saying until "started and finished", because currently the next slide DOES wait until the current video is finished, as long as it has begun playing. But the next slide is not waiting for the current video to BEGIN playing )