[chrinfinity]

I've been trying whatever I can think of to diagnose the video issue. Here's a fresh log with three test cases:

1. Ninja Turtles (AVI) - plays perfect video and audio.
2. Deep Space Nine (MKV) - no video, plays audio with visualization (audio is choppy)
3. Newsroom (MP4) - absolutely nothing happens at all. (I tried 3 episodes, same result).

kodi.log here: http://pastebin.com/QNJAdR2R

[chrinfinity]

The problem seems to be with ffmpeg.

1. It detects A and V stream in the old AVI file, plays fine.
2. It's not detecting a video stream in the MKV file (autodetects ac3 audio stream only - wrong guess)
3. It's just not able to parse into the MP4 at all: [mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2] moov atom not found

But all these specific files worked a week ago.

So like... how can I check the version of the ffmpeg library being used by Kodi and make sure I have the correct version and not corrupted?

[doug]

Sounds like you have this in your advancedsettings.xml file:

<musicextensions>
  <add>.mkv</add>
</musicextensions>

or possibly:

<videoextensions>
  <add>.mp4</add>
</videoextensions>

[chrinfinity]

don't think so - but checking now.

---

Negative -- I checked on the disk to see, and also referred my log file.

full log: http://pastebin.com/QNJAdR2R

See below excerpt:

19:15:49 T:139868716865472 NOTICE: No settings file to load (special://xbmc/system/advancedsettings.xml)
19:15:49 T:139868716865472 NOTICE: Loaded settings file from special://profile/advancedsettings.xml
19:15:49 T:139868716865472 NOTICE: Contents of special://profile/advancedsettings.xml are...
<advancedsettings>
<useddsfanart>true</useddsfanart>
<cputempcommand>cputemp</cputempcommand>
<gputempcommand>gputemp</gputempcommand>
<samba>
<clienttimeout>30</clienttimeout>
</samba>
<network>
<disableipv6>true</disableipv6>
</network>
<videolibrary>
<cleanonupdate>true</cleanonupdate>
<recentlyaddeditems>100</recentlyaddeditems>
<dateadded>0</dateadded>
<cleanonupdate>true</cleanonupdate>
</videolibrary>
</advancedsettings>

[menakite]

Have you tested these files with another player and/or a different machine?

[chrinfinity]

What do you make of FFMPEG failing to parse the video streams of the MKV and MP4 files?

With certainty, I know these files worked properly in days past.

---

I am copying them over to a windows PC to test them in VLC... but I am 100% sure these files worked the other day, and the problem appears to be affecting every MKV and MP4 file in my video collection.

[chrinfinity]

Well Fuck.

You were right, files that I copy from certain drives are no longer working on the windows PC.

Files stored in my torrents folder, which is on a different location, are working fine on XBMC... even MKVs and MP4s.

So... does this mean almost all the files in my media collection have been corrupted? How could this have happened?

I have to run more tests to see which files have been affected by this.

---

There are four hard drives.

Two of them carry files that are giving the broken behaviour. Although on one drive, only some files are affected.

Since it's not limited to just one drive, and because all problems started at the same time, I can't blame a single drive failure.

Any ideas?

[chrinfinity]

You guys were right from the start.

Something must have happened that corrupted every (or many) files on two disks. And for some reason AVI remain playable where MKV and MP4 files were messed up.

New files work fine -- I just downloaded something fresh and placed it on one of the damaged drives and that file works great even while the others won't.

I guess I have to look into file system corruption on linux.

[chrinfinity]

So I guess my only option is to replace the affected files in the collection. Major bummer.

Point of interest, of the four disks involved in the media collection:

1TB- NTFS, all files unplayable
1TB- NTFS, all files okay
2TB- ext2, all files okay
5TB- ext4, some/most files unplayable, some files okay

And whatever caused this happened all at the same time.

[jjd-uk]

How are you playing these files back? If using the Library mode then try from Files just to make sure it is indeed broken files and not something in the database causing the issue.

[chrinfinity]

Yep, broken in Files mode too, and also broken when I try to play them on another machine.

Near as I can tell, at some point during the day yesterday, while I was out at my grandmother's funeral, some event happened on the XBMC computer which damaged a huge swath of files across multiple disks of my system, without leaving any trace of damage otherwise.

File system checks clean, disk SMART health is ok (no dying drives), and all the files are still "there," and I can tell most of the file data is intact, XBMC will even play the audio of the broken MKV files, but they're all just... borked, in some way that their headers are unreadable and they're useless as video files.

It's almost as though I suffered a targeted attack of some kind.

[DaVu]

jjd.uk...

He copied the file to another pc, and they won´t play properly. So it seems not to be a database issue, I suppose.

You were right, files that I copy from certain drives are no longer working on the windows PC.

But I don´t know what might have caused this.

[jjd-uk]

Ah right missed that they had been tried another machine.

It sounds like you might be out of luck then and have lost the files, however I'm more of a Windows man so someone with more knowledge of Linux might be able to suggest something.

[chrinfinity]

Thanks. I would be grateful to learn more, if some linux folks want to weigh in on this.

The fact that two different filesystems were involved makes me very nervous. One disk I could just write off as a failure, but both at the same time on the same day during the same session, that's suspicious, yo.

...and I'm a 'she' not a 'he'