Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

Support Tips

February 23rd, 2008 | Category: Coding | Author: elan

As many of you know, there aren’t a lot of people coding on this project. I try very hard to respond to comments and help people out with the problems they’re having, but any time I spend doing that takes away from time I would otherwise be working on the next release.

Please try to use the following guidelines when reporting problems. This will maximize your chances that I will be able to diagnose and fix the problem:

If you’re asking about a problem that may not be OS X specific (e.g. SMB mounts and thumbnails), please check the forum first. That means you should do a few searches, and then post if you can’t find your answer. If it’s determined to be an OS X specific problem, and it’s not known (e.g. Python doesn’t work), then please go ahead and post it.
If you’re asking an end user question (e.g. “How do I do XXX?”), please post it on the forum.
If it’s a visual issue, take a screenshot and post it to ImageShack.
If XBMC crashes, get a Problem Report, post it to Pastie and post a link, along with a full description of what you did to make it crash.
If you’re getting high speed video and no audio, and you’ve read the FAQ, paste the output when running from a Terminal ($ ./XBMC.app/Contents/MacOS/XBMC). I’m going to be moving this output into the regular XBMC log in the next release.

Thanks very much for reading.

5 Comments so far

Mactastico February 23rd, 2008 12:13 pm

Now to something completely different!

Are you guys all fans of XBMC on Facebook yet?
http://www.facebook.com/XBMC
Jarkko Laiho February 25th, 2008 11:15 pm

All right then, one more Pastie entry, this one about the fast video problem. I’ll stop pestering you with it after this

http://pastie.caboo.se/157481

I hope that’s useful, and as said, I can provide you with the file I used in the test.
Jarkko Laiho February 25th, 2008 11:22 pm

And in a similar vein, the dreaded shutdown problem when launching from Finder. I’ve already posted the gdb output in another thread, but here are the Problem Details as presented by the Apple Crash Reporter after Force Quitting XBMC. The output is divided into two Pasties due to the size constraints that the site enforces.

Part 1: http://pastie.caboo.se/157485
Part 2: http://pastie.caboo.se/157486
elan February 26th, 2008 7:15 am

@Jarkko Laiho: The first problem (fast video) is from the following: You’re playing a 5.1 FLAC soundtrack. Since we don’t do mixdown, you’re kind of screwed. Pick one of the AC3 soundtracks and it should work fine.

Holy cow, you sent me the stack trace for everything running on your system I know at this point why people are seeing this, and I want to see if you still have the problem with the next release before I spend more time on it.
Jarkko Laiho February 27th, 2008 2:56 am

@elan, Re: fast video, I completely missed the fact that the FLAC 5.1 audio track isn’t AC3. Dammit… Seems obvious now that the FAQ doesn’t apply there. The two Chinese sound tracks are AC3, and picking one does indeed work OK. There’s a bit of a delay after switching tracks and the video speed returning to normal, and I missed that too the last time I tried switching tracks. Nothing to do now but wait for mixdown support.

But now that the framerate is back to normal, I gotta say, man, that’s some impressively smooth 1080p playback right there on a 2 GHz Mac Mini

And as for the full stack trace, yeah, I don’t have the necessary knowledge to know for certain what to leave out, especially in case it happens to be a conflict with another running application or background process (which would seem likely at a glance, given that we’re apparently running the same hardware). But it’s nice to know that you’re on top of the issue. I’m looking forward to the next release, and I really should be donating some money soon enough