Long MKVs stop playing near halfway through

[ltcarter47]

Hi Guys,

(trying again, for some reason the forums swallowed up my first attempt to post this….grrrrr….)

So far I mostly have been using Boxee for TV content (as I slowly rename all my movies and organize my media) so I'm not sure wether this is a new issue. Everything I've watched up till last night has been ~45 min max. Last night I was watching an HD MKV movie when it abruptly stopped playing about halfway through. It didn't crash Boxee or the computer, just stopped playing. I figured at the time it was just a corrupt file or something and thought nothing of it. Tonight I was watching a different HD MKV movie and the same thing happened. It was 2:09:01 in length and quit on me at around 0:57:00.

This time I wanted to make sure the file was good so I fired it up in VLC and continued watching it from the 50 min mark without a problem. Launched Boxee again and checked out a few other HD MKVs. When I skipped forward i them I found that they all stopped playing about halfway in. I had an HD M4V that seemed ok. This is pretty alarming since a good 90% of my movies are MKV format.

I'm running 0.9.14.6992 on a C2D Mac Mini with 10.6.2 (sorry, not sure if it does this on 10.5, though I can install 10.5 on another drive and check it out if that helps…)

Any thoughts? Things I should try?

Thanks,
LtCarter47

[NomadDNA]

Does anything happen before the movie stops, such as lagging or skipping?

Are you using a wireless network to transfer data from a NAS? If so, have you tried playing a movie from a local drive?

[ltcarter47]

Everything seems ok until it stops, there's no warning. The files are located on a shared drive over a wired gigabit network. I'll move one to the mac mini and try it out today.

Also I guess I should mention that the first movie and the second movie the next night were on two different mini's. I have identical mini's in the bedroom and living room with boxee, and they both get their media over the wired network from a mac pro with a drobopro over iscsi.

[ltcarter47]

OK, good call on checking local playback, that seemed to work OK. I let it play through the entire movie from last night and it didn't have a problem. I guess now it's time to try different network sharing setups. Up till now I've been using SMB because my volumes weren't showing up in Boxee, but I'll play around this week and see if I can get something to work.

Thanks!

[ltcarter47]

Just had a passing thought on this, does SMB have a file size limit?

I connected my Drobo to my Mac Pro with FW800 (instead of iSCSI) the other day and it didn't solve the problem. I haven't had a lot of time lately to try other configurations though. Hopefully when I get back from vacation in a couple weeks I can put some time in and get this figured out.

[timesync]

I've been having the same issues as you and it's from network playback as well. Here's what I managed to catalog in the way of this issue, if it helps:

http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=13944

Now that there's some kind of confirmation, I may file a ticket in Jira.

[marcel]

go ahead and open a bug..

[timesync]

go ahead and open a bug..

Done and done. http://jira.boxee.tv/browse/BOXEE-4072

[ltcarter47]

Just wanted to chime in since I'm back home from vacation. Got the beta installed. Looks great, but unfortunately I still get the same problem in the middle of a movie. I'm watching your Jira ticket for any future progress. Thanks for letting me know I'm not alone ;)

[timesync]

Just wanted to chime in since I'm back home from vacation. Got the beta installed. Looks great, but unfortunately I still get the same problem in the middle of a movie. I'm watching your Jira ticket for any future progress. Thanks for letting me know I'm not alone ;)

I actually moved everything to a local drive and I'm not having the issue anymore. But it was decidedly inconvenient. I'll keep an eye on the ticket, though. :-)

[ltcarter47]

I actually moved everything to a local drive and I'm not having the issue anymore. But it was decidedly inconvenient. I'll keep an eye on the ticket, though. :-)

I'd do that myself, but I have 2 rooms I want Boxee in, so one of them would be crippled to short videos and internet content (not too bad I guess).

I'm going to try putting a fresh 10.5 or 10.6 on a different mac that will share the content and see if that works. Maybe even use OSX server and see if it makes a difference.

I noticed they requested some extended logs, would you like me to provide those?

[timesync]

I'm going to try putting a fresh 10.5 or 10.6 on a different mac that will share the content and see if that works. Maybe even use OSX server and see if it makes a difference.

Try it. I'm using 10.5 on the Mac Mini hooked up to my TV. However, it was streaming from a 10.6 MacBook Pro. It may help to keep a consistent OS across both.


I noticed they requested some extended logs, would you like me to provide those?

That would be awesome, actually! I was going to do that by adding a network share, but if you already have it hooked up, that would be great.

[ltcarter47]

Sounds good, I've finally got a free night after work so I'll create the logs and then try out fresh OS installs.

Update: Log attached

[ltcarter47]

Installed a fresh 10.6 on 2 identical Minis. One to act as the server and one for the Boxee client. Ran software update, installed Boxxee, enabled sharing on the server, that was about it. Still got the "SMB: Server stopped responding" error. I'm going to try 10.5 on both next. Probably won't finish it tonight though.

[snbloch]

It seems as if Apple stripped out lfs (large filesystem support) from their SMB implementation ever since OS X 10.5, and the same problem persists in OS X 10.6. This imposes a 2GB file limit from a Mac SMB share.

The only ways I have found to work around this are to go back to 10.4.x, or use AFP instead of SMB.

[ltcarter47]

It seems as if Apple stripped out lfs (large filesystem support) from their SMB implementation ever since OS X 10.5, and the same problem persists in OS X 10.6. This imposes a 2GB file limit from a Mac SMB share.

The only ways I have found to work around this are to go back to 10.4.x, or use AFP instead of SMB.

As far as AFP, do you mean mounting a volume via AFP in the finder and pointing Boxee to that local source? That seems to be the popular workaround I'm discovering tonight on the forum.

And for 10.4, were/are you using it on the server, the client, or both?

Thanks for the info, I've added some more things to the list to try.

[snbloch]

Yes, mount a volume via AFP and then use that as a local source from /Volumes/

If you really need to use SMB for files greater than the 2GB limit, you should only need to use 10.4 on the server.

[ltcarter47]

Progress! Last night I installed 10.5 on both the server and client Mini's. This morning I started watching the same movie I've been using for all my tests and it's well past the point at which it used to terminate. Fingers crossed! :D

Update 1: The movie completed successfully! I'm now running the Boxee client Mini in 10.6 with the server Mini still running 10.5. I'll probably try it the other way around after this, just for completeness. So far, 10.6 seems to be the culprit, but at which end?

Update 2: Success using 10.5 on the server Mini and 10.6 on the client Mini. :D

Update 3: 10.6 serving to 10.5 was being a pain, it kept timing out or having some other error when trying to browse to the SMB share. I'm just going run 10.5 on the server and 10.6 on the clients from now on and leave it at that.

[windle_p]

Following the suggestion here fixed this issue for me:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20100212135148675

Looks like it was just a locking issue, now it works like a charm, and it seeks into the movie file quite a bit faster than it did before.

[ltcarter47]

Thanks for posting the fix. The timing couldn't have been better as I'm setting up a dedicated media server to run silently in a closet this week. I'll try this out first thing.