[jaybee]

I picked the wrong time join, there is a new release and the web site went into meltdown

I run a mythtv system with one combined BE/FE and 4 FE units around my house. I've been meaning to convert all my FE units from mythfrontend to xbmc for some time now. Now that mythtv integration seems to be properly supported, I decided to take the plunge. Having done so, while almost everything works correctly, there are a handful of small problems I have run up against. Some have been previously reported on the forums (and google) with no resolution while others appear to not be anywhere online.

OK, so I list my issues below, I would appreciate it if anyone has any information that can help. All my computers are running gentoo using either the 2.6.30 or 2.6.32 kernel with the tuxonice patches. I install software that is stable in gentoo portage, although I had to unkeyword XBMC to get it to install. I modified the gentoo XBMC 9.11-r4 ebuild to:
- Use internal python but external libraries for everything else (otherwise XBMC crashes)
- Modify configure script to check for dca rather than dts libraries (otherwise I can't compile)

1) FE/BE Unit. I have this configured with mythwelcome to auto-start/stop my computer with wake-up and shutdown. It also launches the FE automatically if the box is manually switched on, everything is correctly configured and working. I modified the mythwelcome configuration to launch XBMC instead and it launches correctly, however it does not appear to stop the machine from shutting down. If I navigate the XBMC menus to my mythtv video folder, then as soon as I leave that folder, my backend appears to lose the connection to the frontend and shuts itself down. If anybody else has done what I did, did they need an XBMC launcher script that locked the myth shutdown to make it work?

2) Skip forward/backward on myth recording on wireless frontend. Wireless connected frontends streaming from BE (nvidia video card) works OK in general. However, when we skip through recordings (to bypass commercials), the XBMC player re-buffers the stream and there is a significant pause until we are able to watch again. This doesn't happen running mythfrontend on the same laptop, skipping instantaneously restarts playback at the skip point. Is there a way to make XBMC playback behave in a similar way. This is less of an issue on wired frontends as there appears to be more bandwidth, however this issue is not seen on the wireless computers running mythfrontend

3) Commercial Cut Lists not honoured. All the documentation on the wiki suggests that this will work. We don't use commercial detection because it only seems to succeed about 20% of the time here in Australia (at least for me). However there are some recordings where I have gone through and manually created a commercial cut list (to eventually export from myth). When playing back via mythfrontend, this cutlist is honoured and the commercials are not seen. However, XBMC appears to not skip any commercials at all. Further, when I turn on the OSD, it tells me "ecl:-". I've seen a few other postings about this but no responses other than the type "It works for me..."

4) Atom Netbook FE with Intel Video card. This laptop is running stable 2.6.32 with the 2.9.1 Intel XORG driver. I am NOT using KMS. Everything works perfectly on this laptop. We are running KDE with compositing and no problems with the video, suspend and hibernation work well. As soon as we start XBMC, it displays the splash screen and then crashes the X Server. It appears that XBMC is sending a command to the GPU which results in a hard crash. The screen goes black and the computer cannot be used. Remote access (via ssh) is possible, but X cannot be restarted and the "shutdown" and "reboot" commands lock the computer such that a hard powerdown is required before it becomes usable again. There appear to be lots of postings online stating that netbooks function fine with XBMC, so it is probably some weird configuration setting, but I am a little lost in knowing where to look. The XBMC logs are useless because there aren't any, the system crashes before any log files are written. The Xorg.log file also does not reveal much information.

If I could resolve these problems, I would convert everything to XBMC in a heartbeat, I really hate the myth FE GUI, XBMC UI rocks

I am happy to provide more information if needed

Many thanks

Jason

[dteirney]

1) XBMC closes idle mythtv connections, which is what will be causing your problem. I have a BE/FE combo and have a custom MythTV pre shutdown script that checks for existence of xbmc.bin process running. If XBMC is running the machine doesn't shut down.

2) Mythfrontend might be making use of the calculated keyframe seek tables within the mythtv backend. XBMC uses the standard seeking algorithms in ffmpeg directly on the stream. There aren't any plans to utilize the keyframe seek tables in the mythtv backend at this point.

3) See http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/9946

4) I don't think I can help with this. Can you try a different driver, or perhaps turn off compositing. I used to have an ATI card and the driver was to blame for some issues I had with XBMC (including hard crashes, but not of X)

[jaybee]

Thanks for the reply, it had been a while and I had stopped checking

1) I guessed that and fixed it myself by creating a launch script that did what you say, run mythshutdown -l; xbmc; mythshutdown -u

2) Hmmm, ok. It looks like I will just have to live with the issue when watching on the laptop. As I said, wired Ethernet works well

3) Thanks. Can I presume that this will be included in Dharma - which I plan to install when it makes it into Gentoo portage

4) It is the Intel driver. I am loathe to try the FrameBuffer driver and there is no other real alternative. One of these days I will have to try booting an XBMCLive USB and see if it crashes. If not, something must be different

Thanks again

[NightStormWolf]

3) Thanks. Can I presume that this will be included in Dharma - which I plan to install when it makes it into Gentoo portage

Just a side note, i'm running Gentoo 2010 32bit and have compiled the Dharma source multiple times with no problems. Using it now in fact.

Not a fan of the slow updates to the xbmc portage packages and for the exact hacks you had to do to get 9.11 working. Those should have already been fixed by now.

[LupinSansei]

I don't mean to hijack this thread. But can someone help me setup Mythtv for XBMC? I read the guide how to the get XBMC to communicate with Mythtv but when I click on Live channels in XBMC it doesn't do anything :/

I'm running Xbmcfreak live and Ubuntu 10.10 on my desktop (with Mythtv)

[LupinSansei]

Guess no one can help. I'll keep trying I guess.

[Nick8888]

Include all relevant information including configuration and logs and you might get a decent response. Simply saying "it doesn't do anything" does not entice a person to respond.

[LupinSansei]

Where do I find logs on XBMC live? I can get into the system via ftp. And what kind of configuration?

[ppic]

read a little and search for it !
we can't imagine what you encounter !