boxee exits, lose video completely

[raj]

Hey there,

I'm using Boxee on Hardy Heron. The application exits frequently (doesn't seem to matter what I'm doing necessarily), but the more troubling occurrence is when it crashes hard. I can't even SSH into the box to reboot --- I have to hit the power button. It seems to kill video completely.

It's a fresh install, plenty of disk space, etc. I don't have issues with this machine with other applications, so I'm not sure what to look to change.

Attached is a hwinfo dump. Not sure what you might be interested in, so I'm attaching the entire file.

[marcel]

please send me debug logs (http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=377) ? More info on your HW?

Make sure Compiz visual effects is disabled. You can do this by going to System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects. Make sure "None" is selected.

[agentlame]

also, here are some other graphics-related tips:
http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=345&highlight=glxgears

lastly, have you tried removing pulseaudio?

sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio
killall pulseaudio
sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install esound


reboot after running this.

[killerninjamonkey]

raj, I seem to be having the same problem you're describing. It doesnt seem to matter what I'm doing, but boxee locks up on me completely after about 15-20 minutes of use. I lose video and unable to ssh, it does not even respond to ping, have to do a hard reboot.

I'll post my logs later when I'm home, but I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 with an ati radeon 9600.

Removing pulseaudio and installing esound sounds like a good suggestion, I will give that a try and post my results later.

[agentlame]

Removing pulseaudio and installing esound sounds like a good suggestion, I will give that a try and post my results later.

please do... i'm curious how many people are having trouble from pulse.

[killerninjamonkey]

please do... i'm curious how many people are having trouble from pulse.

I tried your suggestion and it made my computer much worse, but maybe it was something I did.

I ran into a problem with your first step:
"sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio"

That file does not exist on my system, so I skipped it and ran everything else. After that, my system hangs when I log into X and my window manager does not fully load. So I then tried deleting /etc/rc5.d/S25pulseaudio and rebooting. That allowed my window manager to load, but I was still having weird issues and my computer was unusable, so reverted everything back to pulseaudio and I'm back to where I started. (logs coming soon)

[raj]

It doesn't appear that one can remove pulseaudio without removing ubuntu-desktop.

I have also noticed the complete loss of video/ssh, etc when boxee is idle for long enough.

When it's actively playing a video, for instance, things seem to be fine. But after the video has completed playing, if boxee isn't necessarily doing anything, it seems to exit for no obvious reason.

I created the advancedsettings.xml file and now it shows CPU usage and FPS info while I am using boxee, but after boxee crashed it didn't create a log file in /tmp/ as indicated in the other post.

Lastly, I seem to have more crashes when actively playing MP3s as compared to anything else.

[raj]

Thought I would update this:

Haven't been able to use Boxee at all since I posted last. I reinstalled Gutsy and tried Boxee to see if it was install specific --- same problem.

Gave it a try again this past weekend. Upgraded to Intrepid, reinstalled Boxee, but the problems continued: stuttering audio while listening to MP3s occasionally followed by system crash, complete video loss, and then I can't SSH into the box.

BTW, I did remove pulseaudio and install esound, but that doesn't seem to help. The graphics acceleration is also set to none.

Any help would be appreciated --- I really want to use Boxee without problems.