Plex Media Center

I now have the hardware in-house, and have confirmed that the problem appears to be with the ARB YUV-to-RGB conversion. If I enable software conversion (which takes a rather large hit on the CPU), things look fine. I’ll look some more later on tonight.

The bottom line was that the canonical type on OS X is UTF-32LE, not UTF-16LE as on Windows, or WCHAR_T as on Linux (which is a pseudo-encoding anyhow, which means “the system dependent and locale dependent wide character encoding”). On OS X using WCHAR_T defaulted to UTF-8, which – while it is a great encoding – didn’t jive with the rest of XBMC.

I can’t believe that took around 6 hours to figure out…

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.