[healeydave]

I use xbmc on atv and it's everything I wanted and more. You just can't beat the price for the features. However, I just use it for SD tv content and DVD's I won't assume it's viable for HD content (high bitrate) and considering some of the hardware people use to do that and still have problems, you can't expect much.

I've never had a problem with scraping either and it's quite fast doing so. I've added close to 500 movies and hundreds of tv shows and the only scraping problem I quickly learned to avoid was adding the date on ambiguous movie titles.

Hi Tyche,
Your enthusiastic comments gives me hope, I decided yesterday it was a lost cause and let my atv upgrade to get rid of xbmc before I threw it out the window :-) It was several of the most frustrating hours I've had in a long time.

Just to re-iterate, I had no problems playing content, it was just the bug's causing reboots and the poor scraping that frustrated me.

I would love to know your settings to get reliable graphics, I mean I just used the defaults using the imdb database. There were chick flick (for the missus) with really basic titles like "Atonement" & "27 Dresses" with correct spelling that it failed to identify, it doesn't get any simpler than that and yet it managed to get "Indiana Jones 4 cd-1" correct !?!?

[healeydave]

You imagine, but don't know since you've never used it yourself. Why are you commenting again?

I'm commenting because I figured something that had been ported to many platforms must have worked better on the preceding ones to have got this far.

I have to admit my negative comments were born out of frustration and in my experience its no bad thing to have negative comments. At least people that have the same problems know its not just them and it helps flaws get fixed (rather than people praise what does work and keep quiet about what doesn't).

I've never found the info scraping to be reliable on ANY version of XBMC, this isn't an aTV flaw. Its an extremely difficult heuristic to do considering the variations in file names and data sources.

That's useful to know, already I can save wasting any more time trying to get movie graphics and just stick to file listings.

As for the reboots thats pretty strange, nothing I've run across on mine. Strange behavior in abnormal situations is just as common on the Xbox though, possibly even more-so.

I have no idea how anyone that has installed xbmc hasn't seen reboots from using the menu's. Its so common I can replicate it within seconds.

All you have to do it navigate through the menu's, notice on some menu's you can move right and the cursor location has moved off where you were but you have no idea where it is. Pressing and holding menu at that point will cause a reboot.

If you know xbmc thoroughly, you might not notice it because you know your navigation, but I found it easy to end up with several reboots yesterday because whilst trying to find out how to do things, I was experimenting with holding down menu all over the place to see if there was another menu I hadn't found.

[S80_UK]

If you know xbmc thoroughly, you might not notice it because you know your navigation, but I found it easy to end up with several reboots yesterday because whilst trying to find out how to do things, I was experimenting with holding down menu all over the place to see if there was another menu I hadn't found.

I thought I might comment here. I am an ATV noob. I am an XBMC noob. I don't have these crashes. Yes - XBMC on the ATV can crash - but mostly when messing around while streaming rather than just navigating the menus.

It sounds to me as though something may have gone wrong during your installation. From your posts, I am not sure that you will feel like trying again, but a fresh install may be worth trying. And since I am a noob, I don't know if it will make any difference, but I'd also do a restore and update on the ATV first so that I was starting from a known reference point (maybe you did that - I don't know).

[healeydave]

That's exactly what I did, for clarity:

I did an apple restore on my ATV (back to the original ATV O/S)

I then instructed the ATV to update itself to 2.3

I put in my USB stick created with USB Creator (downloaded only 5 days ago)
(That is the best util, so much easier than when I created my original patchstick :-)

Upon ATV reboot, I went into Launcher, Downloads and installed Launcher 2.3

After that I went back into Launcher Downloads and installed XBMC Atlantis (bf1).

I rebooted into XBMC and my problems started.

Unless I'm missing something, I this makes my setup as nominal & standard as it can possibly be!

[healeydave]

Update:
I have two AppleTV's, I have just done exactly the same procedure (as my previous post), so a fresh install on a completely different unit.

How to make it crash and reboot in a couple of easy presses:

1. Physically powered off and back on unit. (ATV boots into Apple O/S 2.3
2. Select Launcher, XBMC
3. Press Play to enter Videos
4. Press Play to enter my network storage (a Fuppes Server)
5. Press Play to enter a directory called "video"
(I get my folder listings consisting of ".. , movies , tv shows")
6. I stop navigating and move left which puts me onto "View: full list"
7. press and hold menu

Bang apple logo, reboot into ATV O/S

[tyche]

basic titles like "Atonement" & "27 Dresses" with correct spelling that it failed to identify, it doesn't get any simpler than that and yet it managed to get "Indiana Jones 4 cd-1" correct !?!?

You should check if you're using folder names instead of filenames for lookups. But I would just get in the habit of appending the date to filenames. Indiana Jones 4 is a 1:1 find while Atonement has multiple results. For example with a file name of "Atonement (2007).avi" imdb gets 1 result. If you still can't get a correct result, I would look at the scraper logs because something is fishy in the config.

As for your crashes, you're best to get a crashreport log, host it on pastebin.com and link it here for the experts to look at. ATV should not be rebooting (obviously) so something isn't right.

[S80_UK]

How to make it crash and reboot in a couple of easy presses:

1. Physically powered off and back on unit. (ATV boots into Apple O/S 2.3
2. Select Launcher, XBMC
3. Press Play to enter Videos
4. Press Play to enter my network storage (a Fuppes Server)
5. Press Play to enter a directory called "video"
(I get my folder listings consisting of ".. , movies , tv shows")
6. I stop navigating and move left which puts me onto "View: full list"
7. press and hold menu

Bang apple logo, reboot into ATV O/S

OK - I have just tried - I can make it crash like that (never tried a long press in that state before). But you don't have to make it crash like that in order to use and enjoy a very capable piece of software. I have watched probably 50 - 100 hours of DVD rips and other stuff in the past weeks since I got my ATV. Just because you've found a simple way to make it fall over, does not devalue the rest of it in my view.

[healeydave]

You should check if you're using folder names instead of filenames for lookups. But I would just get in the habit of appending the date to filenames. Indiana Jones 4 is a 1:1 find while Atonement has multiple results. For example with a file name of "Atonement (2007).avi" imdb gets 1 result.

Spent ages looking up movie names on IMDB for their year and renaming all my files.

My storage now matches a perfect hit (with a manual search in a browser).

Cleared the XBMC Library and did a re-scan (YAWN)......

No better, still finds some crap "Trigun" jap movie as a match for multiple files despite running it on a movie directory with completely different one-off movies in it!?!?!?!

Second day its nearly gone out the window, god this systems frustrating, it shouldn't be this hard!!!!!!!!!!

[healeydave]

I have had a quick look at the logs, I think the scraping part of XBMC is struggling to cope with upnp devices (or at least mine for sure). Its the only explanation as to why other people are able to get any sense out of IMDB scraping at all.

I am scraping files which are resident on a DataRobot running Fuppes. Whilst XBMC is capable of reading the file names ok and even streaming the files ok, it fails dismally when trying to scrape with the results previously noted above.

I think I need to give up on this now, its already knocked a couple of years off my life expectancy through stress :-(

[TeknoJnky]

maybe you should set your sources directly to the file folders instead of trying to streaming them over upnp.

I've always assumed that the scraping was intended for locally or smb network shares, not UPNP.

[healeydave]

maybe you should set your sources directly to the file folders instead of trying to streaming them over upnp.

I've always assumed that the scraping was intended for locally or smb network shares, not UPNP.

AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHH..........

It was UPNP, I just added the the drive directly as an IP address and it looks like its working, its going a lot faster too.

Whilst I'm happy to get a resolution to one problem, I can't help feeling a lot of stress could have been avoided if it was clear at the outset that Scraping is not compatible with upnp devices :-(

[TeknoJnky]

Glad its working better for you now.

While I agree there is no clear indication what the scrapers can/can't scrape, I would expect that most users would not try to scrape or apply metadata to something like upnp (which is generally better suited as a dynamic solution rather than a more static one where you can access/play the files directly).

The shortest route between 2 points is a straight line, you don't need to go through the fuppes at all as xbmc should be to play nearly any common file type directly.

[tyche]

On the bright side, you probably have the cleanest file names of anyone.

[healeydave]

Heheheheh there's always a bright side :-)