[krustyreturns]

Problems:

A) Step 3 above does not work under XBMC Frodo. If I selected the show 2 minutes ago in my Ceton EPG app, when I start to play it in XBMC the time/status bar reflects a total runtime of 2 minutes. After 2 minutes of playback (or even a bit under), the show will abruptly stop and you'll be kicked back to the XBMC menu, even though the total runtime is now actually about 4 minutes. At that point, if you were to select it again, the time/status bar will reflect 4 minutes, and you'll get kicked out again once you hit that 4 minute mark. Important: Under XBMC Eden this is *NOT* an issue. You can keep watching the show all the way to the end. The time/status bar will show a seemingly bizarre total runtime which changes (and never looks correct), but it appears to let you continue to play the in-progress recording all the way to the end. This indicates to me that this is a *BUG* in Frodo (or, at least, a previously working capability that should be relatively easy to re-implement). Note: This is also a problem in the Plex client app (I don't know if it might have worked under previous versions of the Plex client app).

B) When running XBMC Frodo (I haven't tried this with Eden) on the same box as my WMC server, I use the Ceton smartphone app to select a show to record. But, then I navigate in XBMC to my SMB share to "Recorded TV" and I see the show, but if I try to play it, XBMC just clocks, and eventually kicks back an error. At that point, it also seems like my Ceton smartphone app starts having problems connecting to the Ceton server component. Again, this problem appears to only affect the box running both WMC and the XBMC client. On other XBMC clients (e.g., my MacBook Air), I can play these but have the issue described above (A).

Wow, some of my friends have some complicated media set-ups but your’s has them beat. If you get this working perfectly I recommend making a youtube video.

I know about Problem A, because I have faced it in my pvr project, although in a different context. I want to rant about Problem A.

Problem A :
When wmc is recording a show it’s using Directshow’s stream buffer engine. When the sbe creates the recorded file, if you look a the file size in the directory, it starts at around 500MB, even though the recording just started. That’s because the sbe allocates the file in 500MB chunks and fills each chunk with video data until another chunk is needed, then it grows by 500MB again. So what I think happens is that xbmc thinks it has 500MB of video data and it happily streams it over staying ahead of what is playing on the screen, but when it gets too far into the file it eventually starts pulling over the empty/garbage data, when this happens it assumes something is wrong and shuts down. When the sbe finishes the recording, the real size of the file is set, so completed files play fine.

For my pvr project, I wanted to do basically what you are doing, play the output of the sbe file directly with xbmc. Through the pvr interface in xbmc I can tell xbmc on-the-fly what the size is of the file being streamed is, so I figured No problem! – all I needed to do was determine what the actual size of the “real” data was in the recording wtv file. I scoured the internet, and looked over tons of code, I never found how to do it – and it sounds like such a simple thing! I did find that in the registry you can control the size of the chunks, but only down to a 10MB size which doesn't help anything.

I know there is definitely a way to programmatically determine the actual file size because directshow graphs can handle this recorded stream fine, so clearly they know what the actual real data size is, but I am just not knowledgeable in this stuff to have figured out the answer. I have also asked around at a couple of forums, know one knows or at least aren't talking. I gave up and used my own code for the backend of the sbe, so that I could produce a streaming file WITH THE CORRECT FRIGGING FILE SIZE.

Sorry for the rant. I am surprised Eden worked fine (there is probably a good clue there, but my scars are too fresh to investigate). I started to get into xbmc last summer and I experimented using eden to play (completed) wtv files, but I found (like a lot of other people) about 20 minutes into the wtv file the video locked up. Frodo does not have this problem.

The only thing I can say by way of solution for you is just what I have already said, transcoders based on directshow are not fooled by the sbe file size weirdness. So you could transcode to another format and play this file with xbmc, although you might very well have the same problem of xbmc not querying the increasing file size as it plays - perhaps an xbmc guru will chime in.

Lastly if there any video experts reading this who can help me, I'd be forever grateful.

Sorry, I have no idea on Problem B.

Thanks for bringing up this topic.