Hi man..
What whent wrong if after final reboot insatllation logs to console and asks for login and password and nothing after that..?

What sort of graphics card do you have? Did you stick to this guide or add a few other bits and pieces?

Hi,

I have the same issue as Mark, after I followed the guide carefully, I end up with the console 🙁

I have an nVidia ION motherboard.

Best regards,
Christian

Well, I’m jealous about the NVIDIA ION 🙂 OK, what nvidia driver does you system say you’re running and what version of XBMC does your system say you have. The builds of XBMC are possibly still going through some issues at the moment as they merge all the code between platforms. Or it could be something else. A bit of info may help me.

Hi,

well it seems like is was an invalid entry in xorg.config. This driver version doesn’t like the extensions section.

/Christian

Wow, thanks for pointing that out! Hopefully it will help the next passer by. 🙂

Hello, thanks for this useful guide! I only have a problem using XBMC live and it’s that i can’t get navigation sounds when playing music or movies and i don’t have digital audio passthrough… can anyone post the asoundrc file with a working config for digital out?

Thankyou for your guide, I used it last Month shortly after you wrote it to upgrade my XBMC live install on an ION machine, everything worked great….until I updated today…
Then I went to play some (SD xvid) tv, it wont play it over 12fps I have tried about 30 different xvid sd avi’s and it is the same
Whats interesting is that it plays fine (full frames etc) when I go into the file mode and its just playing in the little box down the bottom.

HD (1080p mkv) works fine

I have played around with the “upsample” settings and the audio sync settings and cant seem to fix it (all the different things I have tried either do nothing, result in no video being displayed or reboot xbmc)

….so

any idea what might be happening?

or any idea how to downgrade to whatever was the last version I had (would have been 9.10.2 I guess)

Yes, you can downgrade. You probably want 9.04.2+svn22290-jaunty1 if you can get it. Be aware that there is lot’s going on with the code at the moment, so breakage is quite possible. But with the downgrade there should be little risk trying it out. Quick Steps:

sudo apt-get remove xbmc

cd /var/cache/apt/archives/

ls xbmc-common* (to see which was the latest version i had prior to 22290, i had 22240)

sudo dpkg -i xbmc-common_9.04.2+svn22240-jaunty1_i386.deb xbmc-skin-pm3-hd_9.04.2+svn22240-jaunty1_i386.deb xbmc-web-pm3_9.04.2+svn22240-jaunty1_i386.deb

sudo reboot

The above steps were taken from: http://blog.xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=56664&page=14

You may want to browse there if you need more info.

thanks, I went through the process. the latest i had before was svn22528 … seems to work fine so I wont complain!

Cheers

Thanks for posting this. Any reason this wouldn’t work on a USB thumb drive?

I’m getting a few errors. First, the commands to add the repository GPA keys don’t seem to work. apt-get update complains about missing keys, but I found a different command that seems to take care of it.

The big problem is that while executing sudo apt-get upgrade I get the following error:

Processing triggers for initramfs-tools …
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
touch: cannot touch `/boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic.new’: No such file or directory
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 323: cannot create : Directory nonexistent
update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
dpkg: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
E: Directory ‘/var/log/apt/’ missing
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

Any idea what would cause that?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Nevermind. I created a /boot/ directory and then everything sorted itself out.

Thanks again for posting the instructions.

Well, I guess I just learnt something new 🙂

Thanks!

Thank you so much for sharing this! i noticed a small typo in adding the GPA keys:
# apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 64234534
# apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 318C7509
# apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 40618B66

Then it worked!
Jitter gone and now XBMC will not crash after clicking on the sound icon.
Thank you. Alex

Thanks for pointing that out 🙂 I think maybe I typed it up in openoffice and it autocorrected the — to just one -. Fixed.

Thanks!

THANK YOU!

This is honestly the best help I’ve found on this subject. I think this should be in the official wiki or at minimum a sticky on the official XBMC forum!

:):):):)

Judging by the number of hits I get, I’m guessing you’re probably not alone on that one! 🙂 A bit of a blinding oversight on their part, anyways, they make great software which I’m extremely grateful to have, I don’t mind writing a bit of a doc every now and then. I see the latest update includes options for the new vdpau spec already around vdpau hardware upscaling. And they’ve added vdpau colour lab correction or something. These guys never sleep!

@Spencer: Where did you create the /boot/ directory? and was this all you did different to get the guide working on a USB stick?

Perfect.

There is no other word for it. For the past 3 days I have been screwing around with different installs (windows xp + xbmc, ubuntu desktop + xbmc, xbmclive, boxee etc…) and this howto helped me get a minimum system just as I wanted. Only thing I would note is I used the following lines for each apt-key retrieval:
sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 64234534
as the ones you posted didn’t work for me. Now I have a more recent build and it does fantastic work with both Aeon and Transparency! … Just a patter of figuring out which of those two skins I prefer. Well anyway, thanks again for making this such a easy process (once I found the page that is :-p).

Ron

Thanks! 🙂

This didnt work for me, 1080p is still not smooth, it runs with 17-20 fps … 720p is not a problem.

I have the zotac ion dual core 330, having problems with 1080p from the beginning.

tried almost everything, ended at your site and hopefully re-installed xbmclive and updated to latest version r23946.

this is making me angry and sad, i just want to watch 1080p, why is this so a great problem ? is it a driver issue from nvidia maybe ?

Well, iam back on one older relase of xbmc 9.0.4.1 r 20654. The 1080p movies are watchable, not 100% smooth, but a framelost occurs not that often that is hurts too much and i have almost 24fps …. not perfect but ill wait for other solutions, maybe in the next major release 9.10 from xbmc. thanks for sharing your experience with xbmc.

Oh no! This is the first case I’ve heard I think, plus I kinda want an ION! 🙂 I presume you have tuned on VDPAU so I guess the question is what codec is in the 1080p content you have using? I don’t think VDPAU accelerates the VC-1 codec so that could be the problem. Try pressing the O letter on your keyboard and it should say whether the NVIDIA card is decoding it, or the CPU. And let me know if you fix it cause I want an ION 😉

I just wanted to say thanks for the great tutorial and the follow-up fix.

I had gotten my xbmc Live install all upgraded as per your tutorial, but was still having issues with VPDAU and 1080P playback. It appeared that VPDAU wasn’t even working, as cpu was about 50-70% on both my cores, and I was dropping frames like crazy.

But the fix you posted yesterday about downgrading worked perfectly for me, and now everything runs smooth.

Thanks much!

Yeah, I thought that might help someone, plus it gives a way of fixing future issues. Thanks for the compliment.

Good tutor… thanks

Great tutorial. And thanks for keeping it updated.

Tried following the downgrade instruction but the URL doesn’t appear valid anymore. Get a 404 error. Could the latest Chamelot release broken the URL path?

Yeah, I think there are only a certain amount of days that the files are kept there for. I think between 30 and 60 so as time goes on it will drop off the end. But you can easily choose any set from: https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc-svn/+archive/ppa/+builds?build_state=built and use those. It might be worth trying the latest builds again now anyway since XBMC is now in beta for the new version. I haven’t had time to try the latest yet, but if you have, I would be grateful if you could let me know if it’s still broken so I can save time 🙂

Thanks for the guide, but are there similar instructions for getting smooth playback for XBMC on Windows? I’m having a stuttering issue with an Atom/ION combo board in Win7 using XBMC, but the movies play just fine on the same machine with a regular media player (e.g. MPC)

Hmmmm. What version of XBMC are you running? I presume you’re not running SVN? Therefore, I presume this is not just panning scene jutter rather a general performance related jutter? Originally I thought that the windows version of XBMC also benefited from the VDPAU/CUDA as it runs well on my windows machine, however one of the developers assured me this is not the case and I then realised there was no option for this in the display driver selection within xbmc. My expectation is that considering there is no hardware acceleration it would be one of the following: 1 Performance of your machine (though not likely since you say other media players are OK), 2 selection of display driver within XBMC (try changing it, it’s easy), 3 something funny with the version of the NVIDIA driver you’re running (try changing this too) or 4 the actual version of XBMC if you’re running SVN. The SVN builds can be a bit hit and miss at times. Also, you could try using an SVN version if you are not currently running SVN. There’s at least one page that provides a big history of SVN for windows in zip files that you can use.

Hopefully something there helps 🙂

I believe this is the answer to your question:

Windows XBMC doesn’t take advantage of VDPAU. You can however edit XBMC to launch MPC-HC (Media Player Classic – Home Cinema)MPC-HC will utilize the GPU acceleration from the ION platform.

See this thread for more information: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1185529

oops…that was meant as a reply to Pedram.

I tried both the 9.04 stable and 9.11 alpha.
It’s general playback stutter throughout the movie. At first I thought it was the specific video file and that it was encoded with 5.1 profile, but the fact that it plays fine through MPC, and that I tried another movie and it stuttered less, and I tried yet another movie and it didn’t stutter at all, and all were encoded using 5.1 profile, makes me think it’s not just an issue with 5.1 profile encodes.
I tried all the different settings for render (Auto-detect, software, advanced shaders, basic shaders) and none helped. I even tried the feature to auto adjust refresh rate, but that didn’t help either (presumably because it’s not a refresh issue since lots fames are being dropped).
The confusing thing is that if I press “o” to see the stats output, the CPU usage is only about 50-60%, but the frame rate is about 16-17fps.
I would try a different display driver, but I’m already using the latest chipset from the manufacturer (Zotac).
Something tells me I might have to wait until video hardware acceleration is properly built into XBMC, or I might have to try the Linux version :-(. Not that Linux is that bad, but I’ve already gone through the hassle of trying to get XBMC working, I don’t want the added potential hassle of getting a new OS working.

Thanks for the tip. I had also considered that, but I presume it will exit XBMC to launch the external player (or at least switch the focus), so I’d fall back on that if I absolutely can’t get the movies to play smoothly within XBMC since having to switch into another external program ruins the experience a bit :-).

Hmmm, strange. Is this a media center pc only? If so, don’t fret about linux, just pop in the live disk and you’ll have the whole thing installed in under 10 minutes. On the windows front there’s another angle. I believe that XBMC on windows includes all the codecs as part of the package though I’m not entirely sure so would pay to check. Maybe you’re using a completely different video decoder and perhaps that video decoder is accellerated? What format file are you actually playing? That may help. Also pop in the xbmc live cd and run xbmc off that (without formatting any hard drive etc) and see if it runs ok in that. Then you’ll both see how easy the linux is and test if it’s going to work at the same time.

I think I may try the Live CD to see how that works out.
My reservations about Linux are that the machine is mainly a HTPC, but I also use it for other things like downloading (using various clients/protocols) and I have a network share set up on it and also remote desktop into it from my other Windows machine, and so I’m not sure how to set that all up as easily with Linux as I would with Windows.

I also tried overclocking the Atom N330 chip from 1.6GHz to 2 GHz and that helped a lot. Still some dropped frames, but not as bad as before :-).

Thanks for the helpful comments.

Oh, and in answer to your questions I think the other media player (MPC) and/or codec (ffdshow installed with k-lite) probably uses hardware acceleration so that’s why it plays fine.

And the file type is a MKV file encoded in h.264 format at 720p resolution. I didn’t dare try a 1080p file 🙂

Aha! I don’t think I recall you saying it was an atom. These machines as far as I know are supposed to play video with video hardware acceleration only! Well, at least any h264 codec takes quite a bit of CPU. Considering XBMC doesn’t support video acceleration under windows and an atom is quite a low spec cpu in terms of grunt you’re really only left with 2 or 3 options. Use something other than XBMC in Windows, wait until XBMC supports hardware acceleration under windows or switch to linux version of XBMC. I’ve also read the media portal might support CUDA somehow so you might want to take a look at that.

You can set the linux version to do some of those other things, but it’s not entirely possible with the live version since it doesn’t have a full desktop manager. In fact this is why the live system on linux is so good as a media centre (it doesn’t load anything it doesn’t need, minimising use of system resources). My advise would be to minismise your htpc and point it back at another machine, rather than the reverse.

Hi marshalleq,

Brilliant guide. Still in the process of doing it, but looking forward to reporting how I get on.

One thing…how do you know which dependencies are required?

Thanks,
Gareth

Thanks, um, dependencies for what exactly? In any case it’s probably actually better at the moment to go to xbmc.org and download the lastest alpha of XBMC. I’m running it and its quite stable. No major issues that I’ve found and it will include all the updates in this guide.

Thanks, what did you expect the url to be? Shorter?

Since I overclocked the CPU it’s not as much of a problem (only on some movies), but I think I’ll wait and hope that the Windows version will support hardware acceleration soon. If not I’ll try out the Linux version. Thanks for the help.

I’m frequently searching for new informations in the WWW about this issue. Thx!

Great idea, thanks for this tip!

Can’t you wrap the code portion in a code tag so that wordpress doesn’t convert the two hypen into a single em dash?

It’ll make it easier for people to copy and paste your code.

Thanks

Hello,

Finally I see someone aware of the “video jutter” problem.

As I already installed Ubuntu 9.10 + XBMC Camelot (latest version). The “video jutter” still here in the new XBMC version. May I know how to follow your guide. As I am too new to linux. THX

Oh dear, I’ve been on holiday and I was hoping they’d fixed that. Unbelievable, I’d say the chances of that being fixed in the download are slim. Looks like there’s a reason to look at svn again 🙁 I haven’t got the latest installed yet, can you log a bug with them in case we’re early enough to get it fixed in the public version?

I followed your guide successfully with no errors. However now my suspend and shutdown is completely broken. If I do a shutdown or suspend from Confluence Gui, the screen just blinks black for second. I am running a Acer Revo 3610 and the xbmc live 9.11 repack. Prior to these directions shutdown and reboot worked fine. I even added the “echo USB0 > /proc/acpi/wakeup” to my rc.local file. And was able to suspend and wake from my MCE remote. But now it just doesn’t work either from the gui nor the remote. Another thing I noticed that the reboot no longer reboots my revo, it just relaunches XBMC. And exit no longer functions properly. Exit used to take me X and give me a login prompt. Now it’s just a black screen witha cursor. It’s sad because I feel that there is an increase in performance, but all these other issues are a dealbreaker. Any help would be appreciated.

Hmmm, I can confirm this is happening to mine, but only since I checked after your comment as I just use the power button on the front which nicely shuts it down. I guess that’s why they call it svn. The real question is which part of the update is causing this, ie kernel, xbmc etc. I’ll have a look into it, thanks for letting me know!

can confirm… any solutions yet?

Try this to allow you to post two minus signs.

Erm..the “Upgrade and install to the latest repository updates” section talk about tvheadend but seems to be missing some instructions. copy/paste error?

ps. Most importantly: Thanks for the guide, worked a treat 🙂

i am getting errors when i try to put in the GPA keys, particularly the second and third ones. the first and last ones seem to be working. also the long command string that follows doesn’t work for me so i can’t progress beyond that point.

i am a complete linux n00b – installed live yesterday and that’s the first time i’ve ever tried to use it so please be gentle.

Did you post a single dash or a double one? I remember wordpress automatically changed them to something so try doing two instead of one.

hey thanks for your reply. yeah i definitely used double dashes, i just pressed up on my keyboard and replaced the string of numbers at the end so the rest of the command was exactly the same for each one…

I’d suggest switching the repository stuff over to the “add-apt-repository” command. Adds the repo and gpg key stuff all in one shot.

I’m also getting the same error when trying to add the keys 🙁 can you check this is still a valid install?

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