htpc / pvr hell

XBMC crashes after 10 or 15 seconds; crash log complains about MyMediaDB

2012-02-02T07:06:00.000-08:00

(F-ed into re-installing XBMC)

So for about a week my XBMC hasn't been able to load properly. It's a bit annoying as I didn't upgrade XBMC or it's libraries in anyway, so it has to be one of the plugins. Earlier in the week, I found a forum that blamed it on XBMCs crash handling of a division by zero error, but it looked like I'd need to manually enter the fix recompile XBMC my self. Since I had just borrowed a nail gun from a friend, I felt my time was better spent on construction projects around the house.

Yesterday, it was too late to use the nail gun without disturbing the neighbors, so I tried again. I found a few new forums complaining about a similar problem. Most of the users had XMC running on appleTV, and the devs seemed to downplay the urgency because they somehow related it to AppleTV. Further because of this there seemed to be every fix under the sun listed, from deleting the MyAppsDB plugin, as well as other, to deleting the metadata, to turning off automatic updates. While the order in which I tried these really f-ed up my chances of getting it working.

For all of you who haven't touched anything yet, my recommendation is tun off all newt work connections (or unplug them), load XBMC (which oddly won't crash now) and tun off automatic updates.

I had read a different suggestion about un-enabling specific add-ons. Boxee was stable while the network connection was off, but the un-enabled addons were apparently not the problem, as the next time i restarted it with the network up again it crashed. Since this this didn't work, I followed another suggestion about emoting metadata. Not only did that not work, but boxee now crashed even with the network disabled. At this point I realized re-installing was likely my only option. To ensure that all user data is removed I choose a "full removal" of the XBMC and XBMC-bin packages, then deleted the related (hidden) user directory for XBMC before re-installing the above packages using synaptic package manager. The process should be pretty much the same for non-Linux systems. For those of you who'd rather use the command line (instead of a ton of GUI clicks) the code would look like this:

sudo apt-get --purge remove XBMC XBMC-bin

rm -rf ~/.xmbc/

sudo apt-get install XBMC XBMC-bin

After re-installing all of your add-ons will need to be re-installed. See the my last paragraph about the shout-cast fix for a reasonably efficient way to do that.

Shoutcast working on XMBC

2011-12-27T10:23:00.000-08:00

So I'm now fully switched over to XMBC and loving it. XeeBo is a great skin that mimics Boxeee if one is attached to that style of interface.

There is a ton of great plug-ins for XMBC that are installed out of the box. However I was saddened to find that Shoutcast support was broken. The native plugin just said "broken" but I tried other repositories and they'd let me install the plug-in but none of the streams would load. After a bit of hunting I came across the fix:

https://github.com/downloads/christianschulze/XBMC-shoutcast-plugin/plugin.audio.shoutcast-1.2.0.zip

Another work around is to install NaviX which has it's own version of shoutcast, and I'd recommend anyway:
http://website.navi-x.org/downloads.html

And while we are on the topic of repositories, definitively check out Passion XMBC which contains Temhil's repositories installer (among a slew of other apps). The repositories installer allows you to install other 3rd party repositories from within XMBCs programs interface (instead of having to download and install the .zips by hand one by one). However, do note, that only the versions of shoutcast listed above have worked for me to date.

UPDATE:
For some of the more recently broken add-ons I recommend going here and checking out the video section of http://xbmchub.info/

(re) Installing boxee on Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric)

2011-11-21T06:55:00.001-08:00

UPDATE:
The instructions below work, but when one launches clicker via boxee there is a note in the app that says that "not all content available on clicker is available though the app". Sure enough, the show's I had successfully searched for via clicker.tv where not there in the app. Boxee seems to be a pointless install.

--------------------------------------------------

Okay, so boxee's ability as a content aggregator now sucks, but I had vdpau and my windowsMCE remote working in it quite well. I recently discovered that clicker seems to be the web version of what Boxee is suppose to be, and that there's a decent boxee app for it, so I've decided to re-install.

I forgot how annoying the install process is. Downloading the .deb from the Boxee website leaves one with an error:

Dependency is not satisfiable: libxmlrpc-c3

I wasn't able to find a 3rd party repository that would just fix this, and as it turns out that's because in oneiric, the libxmlrpc-c3 package has been renamed to libxmlrpc-c3-0, so the fix might cause conflicts. I came across several solutions, but the one I found here seemed the quickest:

echo "deb http://apt.boxee.tv lucid main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/boxee.list

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get download boxee

Rename the boxee package (<tab> = use the tab completion):

mv boxee<tab> boxee.deb

then

mkdir boxee

dpkg-deb -x boxee.deb boxee

dpkg-deb --control boxee.deb boxee/DEBIAN

nano boxee/DEBIAN/control

Rename libxmlrpc-c3 to libxmlrpc-c3-0, then <ctrl-x> and save.

dpkg -b boxee boxee1.deb

sudo dpkg -i --force-depends boxee1.deb

sudo apt-get -f install

For those of you installing for the first time & have NVidia cards, make sure you set the rendering in boxee to vdpau (open boxee -> settings -> media -> rendering)

Giving up on Boxee

2011-11-21T02:20:00.001-08:00

So I bought a Zotec Mag with an NVidia Ion with the hope of having a nice small self contained media center. Unfortunately, boxee has been getting progressively worse and worse as a content aggregator since they released their hardware product. Moreover, it's to the point where I think I've found a show, but then none of the sources work. This sucks, because I was relying on boxee due to it's vdpau support.

Fed-up I decided to go back to the roots (of boxee) and switch to XBMC (also has vdpau). I'm still experiencing an array of problems which will be the focus of this blog:

I need all content (even that outside of XMBC) to play using vdpau else it's choppy, I want to get ubuntu, or at least to load this but default, but may have to settle with just getting it working in MPlayer or VLC.
I still don't have a content aggregator, clicker.tv looks interesting, but only plays in a web-browser (and stuffs choppy without vdpau acceleration). I hear there was an XBMC plugin, but it wasn't great.... tempted to re-install boxee and try it's version of the plug-in.
Last I tried to record TV, the source (Happauage usb stick) wasn't always found.
Blu-Ray doesn't seem to work, but it could just be the disc I'm using (Xmen first class) as I hear normal blu-ray players can't play it either. ...I guess the MPAA want to will teach me to stop buying movies and to just find a way to download them.

The girlfriend is insistent about #4, so I'll probably focus mainly on that.