[msarro]

Hey everyone. I ended up building my HTPC around a mac mini, with the idea that I would use external storage devices (USB3) to store video files, and then use crashplan (like carbonite but includes backups of external storage devices too). This has worked great with short videos, however I am finding that, consistently, around 45 minutes into the playback of a file I start seeing stuttering, to the point where the video file will eventually stop playing. When I exit back to the movie list, and then resume the file, everything is just fine. This is repeatable.

Any idea what could be causing it? Is the drive buffering and then going idle? Any thoughts on what to check?
I am using OSX Mountain Lion.

I am using this external hard drive for now:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controll...&A=details

[PatK]

I doubt it's anything in XBMC itself... sounds like something is not keeping up, but the diff is so small it takes 45 min to finally show symptoms. I would hit the keyboard 'o' command to bring up the video OSD diagnostic while watching a movie and look for bottle necks... eventually whatever is happening will show up and effect the frame rate. I'd also run a clean debug log while you're trying to get to the bottom of this, perhaps you'll see a failure listed when you hit this problem.

The very fact that a stop/restart flushes out some clogged buffer indicates some sort of cache issue and I haven't a clue when it comes to Mac systems and how they handle hardware or system cache. Although the external device is USB 3, I'll bet your Mac accessing as USB 2 which would could mean.... 12mbs or lower, while some videos are rated at 7mbs or higher, that might be the smoking gun right there.

[Ned Scott]

It's the dreaded/Mystery Mac OS X issue that happens to some users:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=148243

Happens either at 46 minutes or 1 hour 2 minutes, or both.

[msarro]

Yup, thank you! I switched from HDMI to Optical for now, so I will see if that resolves the issue. I'm not connecting to a receiver, just directly to the back of the TV so I'm not losing anything

Thank you!