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OK, so I've seen this issue addressed in other places, but those topics either didn't completely match with what I was experiencing, or they provided conflicting possible resolutions. So, I'm hoping I can get an answer for my specific variation that helps me out.

I have a dual boot machine with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04. Both have XBMC installed, but I prefer to use the ubuntu install because the VDPAU playback is so much smoother than the DXVA playback. However, I'm forced to keep using Windows because the ubuntu XBMC install stops and buffers rtmp internet streams every minute, whereas I can watch for hours on the Windows side without a single buffer of the video. Looking at the logs for both the installs, I noticed that I get the following error messages during the periods when the video repeatedly buffers on ubuntu:

XBMC DEBUG LOG

As you can see in the debug log, I get a series of CDVDPlayer and CDVDMessageQueue(audio) errors, which all coincide with the periods of buffering.

The fact that these errors occur only on the Ubuntu installation, and never on windows, leads me to believe it is most likely a driver problem (since the hardware is the same, and I presume the core internal software components of XBMC are the same as well). So then the question becomes, is this a network driver problem and I'm experiencing dropouts in the connection. Or is this a Nvidia graphics driver problem that is causing the video and audio to get out of sync? Or is it something completely different that I haven't thought of?

Any thoughts would be appreciated. It really gets annoying when I'm forced to restart my computer (and close everything else I might be working on), just to boot into windows to watch a video stream.
Man, nobody has any input on this topic? Lots of views, but no responses.
Sorry, it's been a busy week with XBMC v12 (Frodo) Beta 1 coming out. Speaking of that, your best bet would be to see if the Frodo Beta fixes your issue. A lot of fixes have gone in, See Beta (wiki) for a link to the Ubuntu PPA for Frodo.
Maybe I'll have to try upgrading to Frodo, though I'm a little hesitant because of problems I had with Alpha 7 on a macbook pro. Are the libraries compatible between Frodo and Eden, so that I can revert back to Eden if needed (just like the upgrade from Dharma to Eden left a compatible library for reverting back to Dharma)?

Thanks.
Yes, Frodo will leave an Eden library behind. It's still a good idea to backup the userdata folder, though.
Ok, so after being gone for a week I finally upgraded to Frodo. Unfortunately, instead of the excessive buffering problem, XBMC no longer opens the internet stream at all. Nothing about the stream changed, as far as I know, and it still plays perfectly fine using XBMC Eden on my Windows 7 partition.

Here's an excerpt from the log showing the new error:

Code:
09:53:35 T:140585672628096  NOTICE: DVDPlayer: Opening: rtmp://204.2.215.118/live?_fcs_vhost=cp104234.live.edgefcs.net playpath=9yNmhmMjqFo9h1GSeHr0uE2Wgccet-C6_960_540_1596@55247 app=live?_fcs_vhost=cp104234.live.edgefcs.net swfurl=http://player.ooyala.com/static/cacheable/1c3d7af1e06c53793eb20187993e2276/player_v2.swf tcurl=rtmp://204.2.215.118/live?_fcs_vhost=cp104234.live.edgefcs.net swfvfy=true live=1 playlist=1 subscribe=9yNmhmMjqFo9h1GSeHr0uE2Wgccet-C6_960_540_1596@55247
09:53:35 T:140585672628096 WARNING: CDVDMessageQueue(player)::Put MSGQ_NOT_INITIALIZED
09:53:35 T:140585476273920  NOTICE: Thread CDVDPlayer start, auto delete: false
09:53:35 T:140585476273920  NOTICE: Creating InputStream
09:53:51 T:140585476273920   ERROR: RTMP_ReadPacket, failed to read RTMP packet body. len: 13844042
09:53:51 T:140585476273920   ERROR: CDVDPlayer::OpenInputStream - error opening [rtmp://204.2.215.118/live?_fcs_vhost=cp104234.live.edgefcs.net playpath=9yNmhmMjqFo9h1GSeHr0uE2Wgccet-C6_960_540_1596@55247 app=live?_fcs_vhost=cp104234.live.edgefcs.net swfurl=http://player.ooyala.com/static/cacheable/1c3d7af1e06c53793eb20187993e2276/player_v2.swf tcurl=rtmp://204.2.215.118/live?_fcs_vhost=cp104234.live.edgefcs.net swfvfy=true live=1 playlist=1 subscribe=9yNmhmMjqFo9h1GSeHr0uE2Wgccet-C6_960_540_1596@55247 ]
09:53:51 T:140585476273920  NOTICE: CDVDPlayer::OnExit()
09:53:51 T:140585476273920  NOTICE: CDVDPlayer::OnExit() deleting input stream

Let me know if you need a full debug.

Thanks.
Alright, updated to Beta 2 with hopes that it would solve the problem. Unfortunately no. Now XBMC attempts to load the stream, fails, and crashes. Here are the errors produced immediately before the crash:

Code:
17:22:49 T:139932942554880  NOTICE: Creating InputStream
17:22:50 T:139932942554880  NOTICE: Creating Demuxer
17:23:19 T:139934282716928   ERROR: CAESinkALSA::HandleError(snd_pcm_writei(1)) - snd_pcm_writei returned -11 (Resource temporarily unavailable)
17:23:21 T:139934282716928   ERROR: CAESinkALSA::HandleError(snd_pcm_writei(2)) - underrun
17:23:30 T:139934282716928   ERROR: CAESinkALSA::HandleError(snd_pcm_writei(1)) - snd_pcm_writei returned -11 (Resource temporarily unavailable)
17:23:30 T:139934282716928   ERROR: CAESinkALSA::HandleError(snd_pcm_writei(2)) - snd_pcm_writei returned -11 (Resource temporarily unavailable)
17:23:31 T:139934282716928   ERROR: CAESinkALSA::HandleError(snd_pcm_writei(1)) - snd_pcm_writei returned -11 (Resource temporarily unavailable)
17:23:31 T:139934282716928   ERROR: Previous line repeats 1 times.

These repeat for about 100 lines in the log before the program fatally crashes.
Can you post a full debug log via a paste site like http://xbmclogs.com or http://pastebin.com ?
Alright. So I turned on debugging and tried to play the stream again. Of course XBMC didn't crash this time, but it still didn't play the video, either. Instead it timed out with the 'Please see the log' error. Here's the log: xbmc_debug_log
Updated to Beta 3 this morning and gave it another try......and we're back to XBMC crashing. This time the whole computer become unresponsive, the screen faded and became dark, then finally XBMC crashed and I got a warning about 'xbmc.bin closed unexpectedly. Your computer does not have enough free memory to automatically analyze the problem and send a report to the developers.' It is a slightly older machine, but it still has 4 Gigs of ram and I've never had issues with not having enough memory. Also during the time of XBMC freezing up the machine, the system load (as viewed in System Monitor) spiked to over 9 on my dual core machine.

Here's the debug log: Frodo_Beta_3