2010-01-04, 01:02
I did a fair amount of searching here and on google, and while I found a few somewhat similar problems posted, I could not find anyone with this exact issue or any possible solution. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, as the new release of XBMC is almost the perfect media center solution for me, save for this glitch.
I have 2 PC's running Ubuntu Karmic 9.11 in 2 separate rooms. One is a custom built desktop, and the other is an Acer Aspire Revo nettop. Niether machine host any media files. All the media files are hosted on a Windows 7 Ultimate (64-Bit) workstation in a 3rd room. The files are served to the network via CIFS/SAMBA.
All media streams and plays perfectly. Even 14GB 1080p Blu-Ray rips playback with no issue. The one caveat is DVD ISOs. When I play one, it plays correctly a smoothly, both in menu and in the film itself. However, during playback the movie will simply freeze and XBMC will be unresponsive for anywhere between 30 seconds to nearly 2 minutes. At which point the film begins playing back again as if nothing happened. This repeats periodically during the viewing. Some films exhibit this behavior every 5 minutes, some only once or twice, but it's extremely frustrating.
I have tried playback using XBMC's built-in SAMBA to add the source. I've tried mounting the SAMBA shared directly in Ubuntu via fstab and via GVFS and then pointing XBMC to them as if they were local folders. All methods exhibit this problem.
I then tried setting up a 3rd party NFS server on my Windows 7 workstation and serving the media that way. This also failed.
However, if I share these files via SAMBA from an Ubuntu Linux installation, instead of my Windows installation, playback appears to work flawlessly. I can't figure out why this is occurring. The media is served from 7200 RPM drives across a Gigabit network, so I wouldn't think it is a buffering or throughput issue. Also of note is that I can load the same files into VLC on the XBMC PCs and playback does not exhibit this flaw. It seems to be something unique to XBMC receiving files via Windows SAMBA.
Any information is appreciated, and I can think of no solution with my current hardware and setup requirements that will allow me to get around this problem.
Thanks.
I have 2 PC's running Ubuntu Karmic 9.11 in 2 separate rooms. One is a custom built desktop, and the other is an Acer Aspire Revo nettop. Niether machine host any media files. All the media files are hosted on a Windows 7 Ultimate (64-Bit) workstation in a 3rd room. The files are served to the network via CIFS/SAMBA.
All media streams and plays perfectly. Even 14GB 1080p Blu-Ray rips playback with no issue. The one caveat is DVD ISOs. When I play one, it plays correctly a smoothly, both in menu and in the film itself. However, during playback the movie will simply freeze and XBMC will be unresponsive for anywhere between 30 seconds to nearly 2 minutes. At which point the film begins playing back again as if nothing happened. This repeats periodically during the viewing. Some films exhibit this behavior every 5 minutes, some only once or twice, but it's extremely frustrating.
I have tried playback using XBMC's built-in SAMBA to add the source. I've tried mounting the SAMBA shared directly in Ubuntu via fstab and via GVFS and then pointing XBMC to them as if they were local folders. All methods exhibit this problem.
I then tried setting up a 3rd party NFS server on my Windows 7 workstation and serving the media that way. This also failed.
However, if I share these files via SAMBA from an Ubuntu Linux installation, instead of my Windows installation, playback appears to work flawlessly. I can't figure out why this is occurring. The media is served from 7200 RPM drives across a Gigabit network, so I wouldn't think it is a buffering or throughput issue. Also of note is that I can load the same files into VLC on the XBMC PCs and playback does not exhibit this flaw. It seems to be something unique to XBMC receiving files via Windows SAMBA.
Any information is appreciated, and I can think of no solution with my current hardware and setup requirements that will allow me to get around this problem.
Thanks.