[yuchrome]

I really want to switch to this open source solution, but so far its proven to be a bumpy ride.

I use XBMC on my HP laptop with Vista Home Premium x64 (SP1 and other hotfixes included). The video content is on an external HDD connected to a desktop (Vista Business x64) in the same room.
I play the content over my WiFi network in Vista Media Center without a problem.

In XBMC However... If Trend Micro Internet Security is active, it can see the other computer but can't access it. I tried adding XBMC.exe to the firewall excemption list, nothing changes. When I turn off Trend Micro, it needs about 10 seconds to access samba share, all the while appearing to not respond.

Also the video playback for a standard xvid rip of CSI and House MD seems to drop some frames, which is surprising considering I have a Core2Duo @ 2 Ghz, 4gb of RAM, NVIDIA 8600GS graphics and Windows Media player + ffdshow had no trouble decoding The Matrix in 720p h264 over the same network setup.

I have a Linksys Wireless g router, bought brand new a week ago. As I said, VMC and other audio/video players have no problem with it.

Here is a debug log i made for another thread.

http://paste2.org/p/145954

[WiSo]

I can only tell something to the network stuff. The problem here is that the windows firewall somehow "prevent" faster access. Even though we use the same functionality as the command line something is different which I couldn't figure out yet.
So unfortunately to get fast smb access you have to disable the windows firewall (see other threads in this forum).

[yuchrome]

Thank you for your reply. Any thoughts about Trend Micro firewall? Is there another executable communicating through smb or is it XBMC.exe? It's added to the exeption list with all privileges.

I'm curious, how much better does XBMC perform in Linux?

[fekker]

I really want to switch to this open source solution, but so far its proven to be a bumpy ride.

I use XBMC on my HP laptop with Vista Home Premium x64 (SP1 and other hotfixes included). The video content is on an external HDD connected to a desktop (Vista Business x64) in the same room.
I play the content over my WiFi network in Vista Media Center without a problem.

In XBMC However... If Trend Micro Internet Security is active, it can see the other computer but can't access it. I tried adding XBMC.exe to the firewall excemption list, nothing changes. When I turn off Trend Micro, it needs about 10 seconds to access samba share, all the while appearing to not respond.

Also the video playback for a standard xvid rip of CSI and House MD seems to drop some frames, which is surprising considering I have a Core2Duo @ 2 Ghz, 4gb of RAM, NVIDIA 8600GS graphics and Windows Media player + ffdshow had no trouble decoding The Matrix in 720p h264 over the same network setup.

I have a Linksys Wireless g router, bought brand new a week ago. As I said, VMC and other audio/video players have no problem with it.

Here is a debug log i made for another thread.

http://paste2.org/p/145954

Here's what I would do to isolate if the network is at fault and what's going on with the shared data.

download wireshark (packet capture tool)
install wireshark

close any other applications and programs that use anything over the network.. this includes Instant messenger programs, irc, etc.

start wireshark
if you have more then one network interface on the computer, capture > options, select the correct interface, start capture.

Create a new packet capture when the Trend Micro is enabled, start xbmc and try to access the data, exit xbmc and stop the capture, then Save the capture to a file(file save i think)

Create a new packet capture when the Trend Micro is disabled, start xbmc and try to access the data, exit xbmc and stop the capture, then Save the capture to a file

Stop the windows firewall service, disable trend micro, Create a new packet capture start xbmc and try to access the data, exit xbmc and stop the capture, then Save the capture to a file

Post those 3 captures to one of the free hosting sites (mediashare comes to mind, there's plenty of options out there) zip it up into one file to save on file size

Post the link in this thread to both of the captures and i'll dig through them

[xexe]

Excellent advice.

I would add that you should use the protocol summary check before you post the files just incase you have inadvertently captured things like pop3 password etc

If you do the shutdown thing correctly you should not have however it is best to be thorough

[yuchrome]

Here are three files http://www.mediafire.com/?mmumkui5ydf

1. XBMC running with Internet Security 2009. Oddly enough it did open the share but again with the delay.

2. startup and share access of XBMC without TMIS 2009 + playing a video.

3. XBMC without the windows firewall on the source computer. Again slow to load but video seemed not to drop frames. Might be placebo, it was only a couple of seconds.

Windows firewall was always off on the laptop.

[fekker]

The slow load times might be the drive going idle and needing to spin up again.

From what I saw in the captures, nothing is making it back over smb when both are enabled.. i'll bet this is a port / protocol level blocking in windows firewall. Or maybe the driver shims for the two firewalls are not playing nicely. (doubtfull as it would fail even with the application off)

I don't see a bunch of retransmissions or anything that would lead to think it's a network error, i'd put my money on the software side of things..

See about adding SMB to flow freely (there's a few different ports that it can use, and then there's authentication that can be a bugger as well as it takes a bunch of other ports).

here's something to try, grab the XBMC live cd and boot up the laptop with that and see if it works better without windows in the mix... also maybe try plugging the external directly into the laptop (as a test)

good luck

[WiSo]

The Linux port uses another smb client which is part of the samba package. it doesn't has this timeout problem afaik.
I really dunno why windows blocks something when using smb (only for a short time) which comes from a windows function but don't do it when done via a ported smb client. As said I'm at a loss here.