[breezytm]

Unfortunately I've never had random crashes with movies and tv shows. I only have them with live tv and live tv in amazon fire tv is very important to me. I need to find a way to prevent the movies from buffering. My best guess is it's because they are h.264 and cpu just can't not handle it. It plays the video but the images are very slow.

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Not sure how to do that, since I'm installing things with adbFire rather than manually copying. I've taken the easy way out, but that does leave me somewhat... less proficient.

Code:

> adb shell
cd /sdcard/Android/data/org.xbmc.xbmc/files
adb push .xbmc /sdcard/Android/data/com.semperpax.spmc/files

I typed that from the top of my head. I could make some mistakes. Verify the syntax and path.

[MaxieWagner]

FWIW, I have found that Koyings SPMC versions work without any of the same issues being discussed here.

My Fire TV experience has been virtually flawless. I am also hard-wired with a 100+ Mbps connection which does not hurt…

It was my own direct experience with the recent XBMC versions that forced me to fully switch to SPMC.

[breezytm]

I don't know if you are using live tv but I do and that's where the issues arise. Both, SPMC and official crashed on live tv but not when playback local contents. I did find a fix. I wanted to test it for a couple of days prior to updating this thread with the steps. I had my fire tv running for a couple of days on live tv and no issues.

Work around that works for me and some one else:

1. Turn off both of the filters (mediacodec and libstagefright) under hardware acceleration.
2. Change hardware acceleration to software.
3. Enable 'allow multi thread software decoding'.

For live tv, you may need to enable deinterlace.

[jpreville]

I was playing around with that.seems to be most stable for live TV. I wonder if there is a way to set livetv to software rendering and everything else to the hardware . via advanced settings?XML or something.I could live with that solution

john

[nero12]

I had alot of crashes too.

Work around was turn off mediacodec ONLY
i enabled libstagefright, otherwise i had problem with playback of 1080p rip files.

[breezytm]

Yeah turn off Mediacodec only works for people who aren't using live tv. With software rendering everything works fine as well but you can tell the cpu is exhausted sometime. XBMC seems to be slower when watching a movies for example and navigating the menus. That could also be because I have my cachemembuffersize to 0 which is using my local storage. The FireTV doesn't have that much storage to begins with. Or because readbufferfactor is set to 2.

Increase the fill-rate of the cache
By default (value: 1), XBMC will only fill the cache a little above what is needed to play it back. It does this as to not max out your network and possibly max out some hardware. For most users and hardware, this setting shouldn't cause any issues, but be aware of it if you have unusual CPU spikes in your HTPC.

I simply wish devs could tell us something. Like is the issue being worked on. Anything.

[Ned Scott]

It has nothing to do with readbufferfactor.

[jjhtpc]

I posted this over in the Serverwmc thread. Koying had suggested this in the libstagefright thread.

If you need to use stagefright for example for h.264 or most 1080 content on an android device then you wouldn't want to simply turn of stagefright. Instead you will want to create an advancedsettings.xml file that has the following:
<advancedsettings>
<video>
<stagefright>
<!-- -1 is default, 0 is never used this codec, 1 is always use this codec, bypassing blacklist -->
<usempeg2codec>0</usempeg2codec>
</stagefright>
</video>
</advancedsettings>

This way you can leave stagefright as your hardware acceleration method to handle .h264 content, but disable it for mpg2 files (tv and recorded tv).
I think this was first suggested by Koying, but I can confirm it works extremely well on the AFTV. I was having occasional crash issues with mediacodec turned on, but stagefright wouldn't play all of my files. The above allowed me to use stagefright and all of my files will play.

I hope this helps.

[breezytm]

@ned Scott - I just saw your reply. I set this thread to notify me when there is a reply and it didn't. Anyway, I am guessing you are referring to the sluggish playback when I enable deinterlace. If you were then you are right my friend. That was the problem. I made the change the same day I posted that comment above and it has been working great. I wanted to wait a week or so before updating this post.

@jjhtpc - That fix doesn't work for everyone. I can't say it doesn't work at all since clearly it is working for you and a couple of others but not for everyone. Many people also suggest using SPMC since that branch has the crash fixed but it didn't work for me either.

DEV - Any chance of fixing this issue?

[onlinespending]

@jjhtpc - That fix doesn't work for everyone. I can't say it doesn't work at all since clearly it is working for you and a couple of others but not for everyone. Many people also suggest using SPMC since that brand has the crash fixed but it didn't work for me.

Yes, making that change in advancedsettings.xml does not work for me either. I need to disable hardware decoding in the XBMC settings completely. Hopefully we can get finer granularity with the controls so that we can only disable it for Live TV while keeping it enabled for other content.

[kingcobo]

I had the regular crash on firetv with both gotham and kodi phase3. Installed spmc week nowmand this works like charm.

[breezytm]

I tested spmc again yesterday. For the crash is still happening. @kingcobo, did you try playback live tv?

[Feierstarter]

Same problem here with SPMC and TVHeadend as a server. Only solution for me is to disable Hardware Acceleration completely.

I also tried to only disable mpeg2 hardware acceleration in advancedsettings, but this is completely ignored. It is not a problem that advancedsettings.xml is being ignored, I have other settings in there that are not ignored, it's only the stagefright stuff beeing ignored.

For Live TV, Codecinfo tells me that stf-mpeg2 codec is used when switching to an mpeg2 channel, but as soon as I see the first picture SPMC immediately crashes. If I stream a recorded file from my NAS I have no crashes, but still the stf-codec is used. As there is no possibility to deinterlace with stf-codec, my preferred solution would be software rendering for mpeg2 and hardware for other stuff.

I will try Kodi Alpha 4 this evening to see if it has the same behavior.


EDIT: After checking again I noticed that I didn't include the <stagefright> stuff into the video-section of advancedsettings.xml. After doing so everything is running as expected, mpeg2 with software rendering, all other stuff with hardware.

[kraka40]

I was having this problem consistently.

Since disabling mediacodec AND enabling audio passthrough they have gone away completely ( 4 days straight ).

<knock on wood>

Running Gotham.

[breezytm]

EDIT: After checking again I noticed that I didn't include the <stagefright> stuff into the video-section of advancedsettings.xml. After doing so everything is running as expected, mpeg2 with software rendering, all other stuff with hardware.

Do you mind sharing your advancedsettings.xml file with the post. Maybe it can help others. This thread is a source of information for everyone who is experiencing these issues and need solutions. I opened it after spending hours looking for answers and all I could find was a little bit of info here and a little bit there. Nothing concrete.

Thanks,

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I was having this problem consistently.

Since disabling mediacodec AND enabling audio passthrough they have gone away completely ( 4 days straight ).

My fire tv is attached to a tv in my room. Can't do passthrough. If anyone else can confirm this works. Please share your findings.