2013-04-07, 19:03
I can't quite put my finger on what's causing this exactly and I'll try to explain as best that I can about what I'm seeing (it's kinda weird).
History: I've been using XBMC + MediaPortal for a while now (more than 6 months) on my 'main' TV with a PC (Windows 8 Pro, Intel K2500, Nvidia 460, 8GB RAM) connected via HDMI. I've kept up with the latest versions of XBMC and Mediaportal along the way and I'm currently running XBMC 12.1 and Mediaportal 1.3.0 final. Since this set up worked so well I decided to buy a small HTPC box (Arctic MC001 with a 32GB SSD and 4GB of RAM running Windows 8 Pro) for my bedroom. I've connected this to my home network with the gigabit port on the back after the wireless connection was just a bit too slow. I do have the two boxes talking with MySQL so that I can resume and keep up with what I've watched. The only strange part of this whole set up is that my mediaportal server is offsite and I use a VPN (Cisco AnyConnect) to connect to it. This has worked and continues to work perfectly on the main PC, even on high bitrate (8 to 14 mbps) streams.
The problem I'm seeing now is that on my bedroom box it will not start streaming a live channel until I go to a web browser and either refresh or load a new page. It took a while to figure this out since I assumed it just wasn't communicating with the mediaportal server for some reason. So I bought up the network monitoring tool on the task manager in Windows 8 and watched. It only starts to stream data in until after I've refreshed a page in Chrome (might work with other browsers, but I've only tested Chrome). So I thought I'd be clever and start a constant ping using the terminal to google.com and just leave that running so that I'd have something constantly 'talking' to the internet. Nope, that didn't work at all, still had to go and refresh a page. I'm sure I can find way to autorefresh a page every so often so that I don't have to alt-tab out of XBMC and go hit refresh but I was hoping someone here would know this issue and have a fix. Again, everything works perfectly fine on the main box and still does, this is only a problem on the new MC001.
Help?
Edit- Other things I should note, this doesn't happen on watching media on my network, only Live TV. I have also Uninstalled/Reinstalled everything a few times to try and sort any issue like that out. Also, XBMC will never time out when selecting a channel, it'll just spin away until I either force close XBMC or go and reload a webpage.
Edit2- I set up tvheadend to try and see if I can reproduce the problem with it, but I can't. Tvheadend seems to work very well on this box, but the big drawback is that tvheadend seems to be way more prone to pixelization due to bandwidth fluctuations but I'm going to run with a while and see how it does.
History: I've been using XBMC + MediaPortal for a while now (more than 6 months) on my 'main' TV with a PC (Windows 8 Pro, Intel K2500, Nvidia 460, 8GB RAM) connected via HDMI. I've kept up with the latest versions of XBMC and Mediaportal along the way and I'm currently running XBMC 12.1 and Mediaportal 1.3.0 final. Since this set up worked so well I decided to buy a small HTPC box (Arctic MC001 with a 32GB SSD and 4GB of RAM running Windows 8 Pro) for my bedroom. I've connected this to my home network with the gigabit port on the back after the wireless connection was just a bit too slow. I do have the two boxes talking with MySQL so that I can resume and keep up with what I've watched. The only strange part of this whole set up is that my mediaportal server is offsite and I use a VPN (Cisco AnyConnect) to connect to it. This has worked and continues to work perfectly on the main PC, even on high bitrate (8 to 14 mbps) streams.
The problem I'm seeing now is that on my bedroom box it will not start streaming a live channel until I go to a web browser and either refresh or load a new page. It took a while to figure this out since I assumed it just wasn't communicating with the mediaportal server for some reason. So I bought up the network monitoring tool on the task manager in Windows 8 and watched. It only starts to stream data in until after I've refreshed a page in Chrome (might work with other browsers, but I've only tested Chrome). So I thought I'd be clever and start a constant ping using the terminal to google.com and just leave that running so that I'd have something constantly 'talking' to the internet. Nope, that didn't work at all, still had to go and refresh a page. I'm sure I can find way to autorefresh a page every so often so that I don't have to alt-tab out of XBMC and go hit refresh but I was hoping someone here would know this issue and have a fix. Again, everything works perfectly fine on the main box and still does, this is only a problem on the new MC001.
Help?
Edit- Other things I should note, this doesn't happen on watching media on my network, only Live TV. I have also Uninstalled/Reinstalled everything a few times to try and sort any issue like that out. Also, XBMC will never time out when selecting a channel, it'll just spin away until I either force close XBMC or go and reload a webpage.
Edit2- I set up tvheadend to try and see if I can reproduce the problem with it, but I can't. Tvheadend seems to work very well on this box, but the big drawback is that tvheadend seems to be way more prone to pixelization due to bandwidth fluctuations but I'm going to run with a while and see how it does.
