Movies not playing
#1
About 2 days ago I started getting errors on about half of the movies in my library. I would select them and the loading sign would come up for about 30 seconds then I'd get the error:

"Playback failed
One or more items failed to play
check the log file"

This happened to movies that had previously worked in XBMC and I haven't made any changes that I'm aware of. I have all of my movies stored in an unRAID server on a 100mbit line. Now my library is very unreliable. It either, plays fine, takes about 30 seconds to load the movie, or takes a while and then gives me the playback error. I removed the source and rescanned to no avail.

My TV show library is working perfectly fine. So I'm not sure exactly what the problem is. I've had XBMC for over a year and never had this issue with playback over a network. Any ideas?
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#2
Hi

Just wanted to know that you're not alone. I don't know what it is but I'm having exactly the same problem with my movie library since Dharma. TV shows work just fine though and movies seem to be affected at random. One movie will play at one time and at another time that same movie will fail. I've posted a thread about this a few day ago, asking the same thing as you. No solution yet. I should mention that all my movies are stored localy on my XBMC PC but I'm still having the same problem as you. So at least I can tell you that it's not network related. I've had this problem since Dharma beta 1-4 and even still in the official Dharma release.
Also, I've noted that the menus in Dharma tend to lag and become sluggish after a while. This will only last for a few seconds at a time and mostly just after watching a movie. Don't know what it is but Dharma has some real problems. I've reinstalled Windows twice. First Vista 64bit then I tried a clean install of Windows 7 64bit. Under both OS Dharma behaved like this. Maybe it could have something to do with 64bit Windows in general? I've also made several clean installs of XBMC trying to find the cause of it all. Anythnig pre-Dharma works just fine for some reason.
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#3
So I've continued testing and I'm still having the issues. The strange thing is that it just started happening out of nowhere. My living room HTPC running Windows 7 32bit with Dharma RC2 and my bedroom running Dharma 10.0 on Windows 7 64bit both started having the issue at the same time. I click play on a movie, it loads for about 30 seconds then gives me playback error. If I click play on that same movie again, it will work. I'm really confused as to what could have caused this. Though I still haven't ruled out my unRAID system because how is it that all of the computers running different versions of XBMC would start giving this problem simultaneously?

On a side note, I installed it on a Mac and it also had the same problem.
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#4
Same issue here. Tried every possible combination, swapped hardware, fresh install, random performance. Pre-dharma everything worked fine. Windows 7, 32 bit, on a high end HTPC.
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#5
Some movies don´t play no more. Same error message as below

fonzie Wrote:About 2 days ago I started getting errors on about half of the movies in my library. I would select them and the loading sign would come up for about 30 seconds then I'd get the error:

"Playback failed
One or more items failed to play
check the log file"

This happened to movies that had previously worked in XBMC and I haven't made any changes that I'm aware of. I have all of my movies stored in an unRAID server on a 100mbit line. Now my library is very unreliable. It either, plays fine, takes about 30 seconds to load the movie, or takes a while and then gives me the playback error. I removed the source and rescanned to no avail.

My TV show library is working perfectly fine. So I'm not sure exactly what the problem is. I've had XBMC for over a year and never had this issue with playback over a network. Any ideas?
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#6
Just out of curiosity, have you guys done a database clean-up? Sometimes that solves some issues if you have done a lot of moving around, etc?

I would probably export my library to individual files, delete my movie source, clean the database, and then re-add the movies. Kind of a drastic move, but if you do the export it will be mostly painless.

The other thing that I (and others) have seen in the past is if you have a corrupt video file hiding in your library, it can cause some unexpected results. Basically, the system continues to try and pull meta data from the corrupt file and causes a system tangle. Not positive this could cause the issue - might be it.
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#7
I use Ember Media Manager to sort my Movies. Each movie is in a separate folder with an nfo, tbn, and fanart.jpg file. I have deleted and re-added my sources about 3 times. Rescanned everything. Still, sometimes the movies will play and sometimes they wont. It all seems very random.
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#8
Without a debug log, no one will be able to help you. Enable debugging, reproduce the issue and then paste the log to pastebin.com or similar site.
-stoli-
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#9
The problem seems to have gone away. The only thing that makes sense to me is that it was occurring because my unRAID system was running a parity check during that time.
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#10
I have the same exact problem - movies on my HDD, no major changes etc. However, I have added [by accident] a few corrupted (more like, incomplete) movies to the library - that might be it. So I'm gonna remove them, clean the library and see what happens...

UPDATE [5 mins later]
Yeah that fixes it.

So if you have any corrupted movies (partially downloaded or whatnot) in your movie library, for whatever reason, there is a chance that none of your movies will play via the library interface. You can still play regular movies via the Videos -> Movies -> Individual folders method, but that just isn't what XBMC is for, now is it? Simply remove those specific, corrupted movies from your library (no need to remove them from the disk or anything) and clean your library [Settings -> Videos -> Clean Library] just to be safe. Should work again. A good idea would be to download movies into a temporary folder OUTSIDE the main movie folder used by XBMC for scraping, and copy them in when they're completely downloaded. Assuming that partial downloads are the 'corrupted' files...
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