[jjhtpc]

If this isn’t a good place to post this question then I do apologize.

I have been a Windows Media Center user for almost 10 years now but I am in the process of trying to switch all of my HTPC use to the Fire. I have XBMC running and it’s mostly working very well. I have Digital Dolby and DTS audio working over the Spdif output, I have OTA/Live/PVR TV working via PVR.WMC / ServerWMC. Baring a few stability issues when channel changing it is working pretty well, (thanks a lot to all of the wonderful developers and contributors who have taken XBMC far)

The problem that I am experiencing that I haven’t been able to google a solution to occurs when attempting to play certain WTV files. Yesterday I spent some time fiddling with ServerWMC thinking that it was the likely culprit but I’ve concluded that, that isn’t very likely because the files that don’t play won’t play even when using the ‘Videos’ section of XBMC to play them directly.

I have hundreds of TV shows recorded and most of them play just fine but these ones that won’t play do something very odd. When you choose them, you get audio for a few seconds but never any video. And then, after maybe 10~20 seconds, the audio stops. If I choose to force the image to go full screen by manually selecting the full screen option my display is then filled little tiled images of the progress bar.

To make it even stranger, last night I had PVR.WMC/ServerWMC/WMC setup to record the news. XBMC saw that the news was being recorded but when I tried to start watching the broadcast in progress I realized that this file was going to be one of those bad ones. (Audio for a few seconds, no video, and eventually it stops playing) but what was different this time is that since the recording was in progress I was able to select an option to start playback at the current time, 20 minutes into the broadcast, and that worked! The file started playing normally. I just hit rewind and watched it from the beginning. After the broadcast was over, I tried playing it from the beginning using PVR.WMC (and later by directly clicking the WTV file from the ‘Videos’ section of XBMC) and it would not over. Just the same error, a few seconds of audio, no video and eventually it just stops playing.

• Here is a summary of mysetup.
  
• Amazon Fire TV (HDMI video, Spdif audio)
  
• Windows 8.1 + Windows Media Center
  
• ServerWMC
  
• HDHomeRun dual tuner
  
• XBMC 13.0 (latest stable release, not beta)
  

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a work around? I guess that this weekend I can try to see if the beta builds improve the situation. I’m new to XBMC, Android and the Fire TV but I’m fairly technically savvy. Is there an error log that I can get to on the device that might help?

I have a very similar setup with Windows 7 and serverWMC with an Ceton Infinitv4. I have not experienced these problems, but I have had a few scenarios where wtv files would kick off audio but no video. I found that neither libstage or mediacodec worked very well so I just turned on hardware acceleration and turned off both mediacodec and libstage. After doing that everything has been working as expected.