[voip-ninja]

I've loaded XBMC Live Freak v14 CD and done a disk install to a thumb drive on my Revo 1600.

I am having some issues and after searching around I am hoping I can get some help.

One of the things I'm most curious about is whether or not it's a good idea to update to the latest SVN as I see in many threads mention of issues that are fixed in newer SVN. Is this a good idea if I want a stable XBMC experience? I'm guessing probably not.

Actual issues I'm experiencing and confused about;

1. IR remote limitations. I bought a generic MCE remote control and it can do some basic things in XBMC but I can't get most of the buttons to be recognized. I understand from searching around that I probably need to create my own custom keymap file but I'm confused about how to know what button names the various buttons on the MCE correspond to. As one example, I would like to map the power button on the MCE remote to put the Revo into suspend mode.

2. Black crush. I see a thread about black crush but even after monkeying about with the contrast/brightness settings I am not able to get a good gamma out of this thing and it's resulting in sub-par video to my TV.

3. Audio issues. I have ripped all of my Blu-ray discs to .mkv files that contain the original audio track (PCM, DTS-MA, Dolby-TrueHD, etc) as well as a remuxxed AC3 track. Unfortunately it seems that when playing anything OTHER than an AC3 track I am getting no end of headaches with XBMC pausing/freezing the video, losing the audio, garbled audio, crash to command line, etc. Is there any way or a request out already to give XBMC a preference to always play the AC3 track if it is present? I'd rather not have to remux my files as they work great with my Popcorn Hour and it will soon have full support for all of the HD audio tracks.

4. General instability. I'm only using the Confluence skin, but even in this skin I am having some instability issues such as crashes to the command line. I want to try the Aeon65 skin, can anyone tell me if it is at all reliable with this SVN before I set it up?

Thanks. I do have some basic knowledge of Linux but am by no means a Linux expert.

[Venares]

See my post here reagrding the Revo that may be of some help to you.
The audo problem is without doubt caused by the nvidia drivers breaking LPCM output totaly, you will need to update them.
Instructions in my previous post linked above.

[voip-ninja]

See my post here reagrding the Revo that may be of some help to you.
The audo problem is without doubt caused by the nvidia drivers breaking LPCM output totaly, you will need to update them.
Instructions in my previous post linked above.

Hi Vanerase, thanks for taking time to respond.

I actually followed your guide (and very much appreciate you writing it) when I initially installed Live.

The problem is that I loaded the Aeon65 skin and after that when Ubuntu started XBMC was unable to load and it would just drop the the CLI login with a bunch of errors and XBMC could never be started. I had to reload XBMC Live at that point and haven't updated the SVN yet.

I expected that the latest SVN in conjunction with the Nvidia drivers and that particular skin seemed to be pretty badly broken.

Do you know if I can safely update the Nvidia drivers as indicated in your post without updating to the latest SVN?

Anything else I should know about? I'm eager to get this going but of course there is so much tweaking/configuration know how needed to get XBMC dialed in right, even when starting with good documentation, tools and pre-built configs like XBMC Live.

Thanks and I hope I can get this working satisfactorily! Right now my wife is ready to chuck the Acer (and me) out on the street!

[Venares]

LOL
Yeh getting it all setup can be a real PITA but its worth it in the end.
You should be able to update the drivers without any problem without updating to the SVN.

Just make sure you run the following after otherwise the channel mappings will be screwed up.

Code:

sudo wget http://pastebin.com/download.php?i=f5f9654bb -O /etc/asound.conf
sudo wget http://pastebin.com/download.php?i=f2e38265 -O /usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf

If its just AEON65 that is causing you to crash thats generaly due to not running the latest SVN.
It possible that something went a bit strange when you where doing the initial build and it didnt update properly.
I noticed in my guide that I forgot to issue a sudo reboot after the innital update run which may or may not be the cause.
Try the below and see how you go:

Code:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install xbmc-live
sudo reboot

At this point it will come back up and bitch about the graphic drivers, just ignore it and carry on.

Code:

sudo apt-get install build-essential cdbs fakeroot dh-make debhelper debconf libstdc++5 dkms linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo apt-get install subversion
sudo apt-get build-dep xbmc-live
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install xbmc-live
sudo reboot

Again it will complain about the graphics, just run the update and reboot and all should be good.

[voip-ninja]

okay, I'm going to try it and see how it goes.

Is there a newer Nvidia driver to use or the same one you mentioned in your original post?

P.S. Do you have any pointers on modifying the button keymap for this sucker? I am still a bit confused about it.

[Venares]

As far as im aware the one in my post is the latest.

As for keymaps, copy the 2 files in the below zip over to your box via FTP and stick them in the following location.

/userdata/keymaps/

Keymaps.zip

You can then alter the enteries in these files as you wish.

[voip-ninja]

As far as im aware the one in my post is the latest.

As for keymaps, copy the 2 files in the below zip over to your box via FTP and stick them in the following location.

/userdata/keymaps/

Keymaps.zip

You can then alter the enteries in these files as you wish.

I'm not seeing a /usrdata/keymaps or /usr/data folder

Is one of these two locations correct?

/usr/share/xbmc/system/keymaps
/home/xbmc/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps

[Venares]

/home/xbmc/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps

[voip-ninja]

/home/xbmc/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps

xbmc@XBMCLive:~$ cd /home/xbmc/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps
[email]xbmc@XBMCLive:~/.xbmc[/email]/userdata/keymaps$ ls
[email]xbmc@XBMCLive:~/.xbmc[/email]/userdata/keymaps$ wget http://venares.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Keymaps.zip
--2010-06-12 20:47:38-- http://venares.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Keymaps.zip
Resolving venares.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk... 194.117.143.87, 194.117.143.85
Connecting to venares.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk|194.117.143.87|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 6230 (6.1K) [application/zip]
Saving to: `Keymaps.zip'

100%[======================================>] 6,230 38.6K/s in 0.2s

2010-06-12 20:47:39 (38.6 KB/s) - `Keymaps.zip' saved [6230/6230]

[email]xbmc@XBMCLive:~/.xbmc[/email]/userdata/keymaps$ ls
Keymaps.zip
[email]xbmc@XBMCLive:~/.xbmc[/email]/userdata/keymaps$ unzip Keymaps.zip
Archive: Keymaps.zip
inflating: remote.xml
inflating: keyboard.xml
[email]xbmc@XBMCLive:~/.xbmc[/email]/userdata/keymaps$ ls
keyboard.xml Keymaps.zip remote.xml
[email]xbmc@XBMCLive:~/.xbmc[/email]/userdata/keymaps$

Awesomeness, now just have to see if I can get it to work as I would like!

I also tested a reboot and you are right, it is surviving the reboot!

Unfortunately I have one annoying new problem that did not exist on the older SVN, the Acer can no longer suspend/hibernate/shutdown from the XBMC menu. I can only shut it down by SSH into the box and then initiate shutdown which is a bit of a drag. This was working prior to doing the updating. Do you know if any workarounds for this exist?

[voip-ninja]

I'm also noticing that with this latest SVN and the Nvidia beta drivers, I can't get TrueHD tracks to play. They will actually consistently crash XBMC and cause it to restart if selected.

The remote I bought is Ortek VRC1100. What a pain in the butt. Finally realized I only need to use the keyboard.xml file and then had to find the codes for the color buttons and a few of the other buttons and get them mapped in.

Also some weirdness/anomalies with the Aeon65 skin but at least it's all working now at about 85%.

If I could get the other audio tracks to at least play without crashing me that would be great, and of course the power suspend problem is a bit of a drag.

Thanks again for the help, hopefully these final problems get fixed soon.

[neil.j1983]

i had to:

Code:

sudo apt-get install acpid

to get the xbmc power buttons to work, but for some reason I can only do suspend/hibernate (?!)

[voip-ninja]

i had to:

Code:

sudo apt-get install acpid

to get the xbmc power buttons to work, but for some reason I can only do suspend/hibernate (?!)

Tried that and unfortunately says that acpid is already at the latest version. Mine won't power off or suspend from the remote so I have to walk up and thunk it manually. Not the end of the world but kind of annoying.

[voip-ninja]

Not to be a pain in the ass but I'm also noticing severe Judder on some content such as my VC1 mkv files (these are straight Blu-ray rips not crappy downloads with goofy frame offsets on them). Playing with the vsync settings and de-interlacing settings don't seem to help at all with this.

This is just getting to be frustrating. Fix one thing and three other annoyances pop up.

[voip-ninja]

I just tried to play a video file and it crashed XBMC. Unfortunately now I'm back to XBMC not starting (the process is running but I get no video out) which is what I ran into before I reloaded the whole thing.

Is there any way to start it in safe mode or configure it with some safe options to get it running so I don't have to rebuild it again?

[voip-ninja]

Okay, not sure what happened but I could not get it recovered. I even tried to remove the gui config file but that had no effect.

I tried recovering the Nvidia ION drivers but that failed too.

I just went ahead and reloaded the Live disc and will be waiting a while before I try updating the SVN again, it just seems to be too much trouble right now. You could say that the unreliable/juddery VC1 playback was sort of the final straw.