[wrgarrett]

I am completely new to XBMC. On my son's suggestion, I set up an unused pc I built a few years ago with XBMC. It has an AMD processor running at 2.2gz with 2gb ram. The motherboard is AGP so I upgraded the video card to a GeForce 6200 AGP video card and adjusted the bios accordingly but I am having problems playing .mkv files. The video will play for about 30 seconds and then it locks up and I have to reboot. I am sure I need updated drivers but I haven't a clue as to how to get them or how to install them. I ran the Check for Updates and it installed some 34+ mb of updates. Is there a guide or other resource I can refer to help me?

[Temar]

I am completely new to XBMC. On my son's suggestion, I set up an unused pc I built a few years ago with XBMC. It has an AMD processor running at 2.2gz with 2gb ram. The motherboard is AGP so I upgraded the video card to a GeForce 6200 AGP video card and adjusted the bios accordingly but I am having problems playing .mkv files. The video will play for about 30 seconds and then it locks up and I have to reboot. I am sure I need updated drivers but I haven't a clue as to how to get them or how to install them. I ran the Check for Updates and it installed some 34+ mb of updates. Is there a guide or other resource I can refer to help me?

If we are talking about Ubuntu here, you can get current drivers from:
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates

However you might want to consider downgrading your drivers. The 6xxx series is afaik the oldest GPU which is still supported by the current Nvidia drivers. Therefore they sometimes do not test their latest driver very well on that card. I have a laptop with a 6600 card and I'm currently running version 260.19.06. However I had to downgrade my driver many times to the Nvidia legacy driver in the past. It sometimes happens that they mess up the support for old cards.

Considering that you probably won't benefit from the latest driver and you can't run VDPAU anyway with a 6200, you might as well switch to the legacy driver. It's at least worth a try and if it works you will save yourself some trouble in the future, as they do not update that driver very often.

If you are using Ubuntu you can install the Nvidia legacy by typing...

Code:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-173

[wrgarrett]

On this pc, I have Ubuntu 8.4, Kbuntu 8.4, Windows XP Professional and XBMC for Linux installed.

On a whim, I downloaded and installed XBMC for Windows. I booted into Windows and encountered the same problem with XBMC locking up. I then tried to view an .mkv in Windows and Windows locked up too. I then went to GeForce.com and downloaded the latest Windows drivers and same problem. Could it be that my pc doesn't have the resources to run an .mkv file since the problem is not isolated to XBMC?

I also tried XBMC Live and have the same problem with it locking up.

I consulted the XBMC Wiki and found: (Team-XBMC recommends NVIDIA GeForce 6150 or later as NVIDIA are currently the manufacturer that offers good device-drivers for Linux (and NVIDIA GeForce 6150 or later supports OpenGL 2.0). It would seem that I have the correct video adapter.

[Temar]

On a whim, I downloaded and installed XBMC for Windows. I booted into Windows and encountered the same problem with XBMC locking up. I then tried to view an .mkv in Windows and Windows locked up too. I then went to GeForce.com and downloaded the latest Windows drivers and same problem. Could it be that my pc doesn't have the resources to run an .mkv file since the problem is not isolated to XBMC?

Does the system really lock up or are you still able to use Ctrl-Alt-Del or switch to a console on Linux?

Normal userland applications like XBMC should not be able to crash an operating system. Otherwise there is a serious bug in the operating system. As you tried multiple operating systems and managed to crash each of them, you might have serious hardware problems.

If your system lacks the necessary resources to play a file, XBMC will skip frames but it should not crash. Still you might have discovered a bug in XBMC - this bug however, should not be able to crash your PC. So you definetly have other problems as well.

[edz2k9]

Hi all

Could also be that the card is overheating or the cpu/gpu is drawing too much power from an older power supply when its asked to render video. H264 is hard work to decode for a cpu and it will draw more power when decoding MKVs (assuming the MKV is H264 video) than playing mpeg2 / divx / xvid.

Do you have a spare power supply unit you can test?

[wrgarrett]

Seems as if the brand new card was bad. On a whim, I put my old ATI All In Wonder back in and it seems to work fine. For some reason though, not related to the video, XBMC only boots up to a command line. I tried it with the Live CD and same thing so I was unable to confirm that the card will work in Ubuntu version. It does work fine in Windows XBMC.

Thanks all. I will post the boot problem in the appropriate area.