Channel starting sometimes fails with "no buffer file"

[Swifty]

Continuation from the development thread....

@wileecoyote; yep, x64 clients here.
Possibly something to do with some length calculation made on x64? - I think I read something like that before :-\

[Red_F]

The Big Change that broke this for both of you, was moving from my own Samba client code inside the add-on towards the file I/O routines provided by the XBMC PVR api.

Make sure that both XBMC and the add-on are compiled on exactly the same environment. Otherwise mismatches on run time libs used to link can mess up things too.

Perhaps we should start a thread about this at the XBMC forum, PVR section too (or maybe we just need to search there, to find that this is a know problem ).

[wileecoyote]

I guess I'm late to the party as far as where/when the issue started. The problem for me was discovered when I installed XBMCBuntu on three of my clients that previously had Windows 7. I did this at the same time I upgraded my FTR server to Argus TV (I know, too many changes at once ).

But, as I mentioned in the other thread, I loaded one of my 'trouble' clients with OpenElec Generic 32 bit and it works fine. Since, I loaded the OpenElec ION 32 bit (11/24) build on the other two Zotac ZBox's and they too are working fine.

So what is different from the XBMCBuntu builds and the OpenElec 64 bit? From my knowledge XBMCBuntu is built on Ubuntu 12.0.4 32 bit correct?

[Red_F]

The XBMC wiki mentions it is based on "Lubuntu 12.04". The Lubuntu website says "Lubuntu is a flavor of Ubuntu based on the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE)".

So yes, it looks like there is Ubuntu 12.04 underneath it all. But perhaps with all the stripping and modding done to get a lightweigth OS, something in the network layer was changed or went missing.

I'll try to get a XBMCBuntu running in a virtual machine to see what happens.

[Swifty]

Well, I just put Openelec i386 (24/11) and the latest Argus plugin on my Revo and it's the same

Tunes one channel ok and then bam... nothing until I restart.
I just tried to start a channel and then press channel + through a few channels too, it made it through 3 channels before it died with the same error.

[wileecoyote]

@Fred, I rarely say this, but I hope it fails on your XBMCBuntu install That way you will have something first hand to work with...

@Swifty, damn, sorry that didn't work. I have been playing with one of my clients for the past few hours, stopping Live TV every 10 minutes or so and I have only got it to fail once. And on that instance I think I started a new channel too quickly after stopping the last channel.

[Swifty]

@wilee,
Is this still working fine for you by using the i386 version of openelec?

[wileecoyote]

@wilee,
Is this still working fine for you by using the i386 version of openelec?

Yes, it is working without fail. In fact, this weekend (or this week if I have time) I planned on trying the 64 bit version just to see if it works as reliably.

I would like to load XBMCBuntu back on one of the machines so I can help Fred further test and maybe find a resolution.

@Fred, did you ever get a chance to load XBMCBuntu? Did it Pass/Fail?

[Swifty]

Hmmm.. strange!
I've been away on business for the last few day, but I'll try some more things tomorrow since its driving my wife nuts

[Red_F]

...

@Fred, did you ever get a chance to load XBMCBuntu? Did it Pass/Fail?

Yes I got XBMCBuntu installed. And yes, it is working quite nice.

What I did is install XBMCBuntu. After booting, logout and login again to the xbmcbuntu environment, not xbmc. Next I installed Git, all the pre-requisites for compiling xbmc. With all that done I cloned the xbmc-pvr-addons repository and built the add-ons on xbmcbuntu.

After a little searching I found where the binary had to go (/usr/lib/xbmc/addons/pvr.argustv/XBMC_ArgusTV.pvr) and where the other resources needed to be copied to (/usr/share/xbmc/addons/pvr.argustv/ for addon.xml, changelog.txt, icon.png and the entire resources folder). The configured settings (the ones you enter on the Configuration screen of the add-on) are in .xbmc/userdata/addon_data/pvr.argustv/settings.xml.

The only hiccup is that I must enter the ipaddress of my server. Can't use the name, the dns entries for xbmcbuntu are pointing to outside DNS servers so it wil not resolve 'madcat' into 192.168.178.64

But if I do that then Live-TV runs fine.

This may sound stupid, but did you set up the windows workgroup setting correctly in XBMC?

It is on the XBMC menu's under "System / Settings / Services / SMB client / Workgroup"