playing Bluray hanging on regular intervals using MakeMKVCon

[rikkards]

I have posted something similar on the XBMC forum but I figured I would post here as well as I am unsure if the issue is MakeMKVCon or XBMC (my suspicions is more the former than the latter).
Some background:
Machine
Zotac IONITX F-E which is an Atom 1.6G dual-core processor with nvidia ION chipset.
4G RAM
40G Intel SSD
LG 10X Blu-Ray drive

There is a plugin on XBMC on linux that basically does the following:
1. Starts makemkvcon stream
2. Starts up the builtin media player and connects it to the stream.

What I am having problems with is when I first set it up it seemed to work however I noticed that it would regularly hang every 5 minutes or so. Best way to describe it is as if it was being paused for 20 to 30 seconds and then unpauses. Looking in the XBMC.log found the following entries around the same time:

CDVDMessageQueue(audio)::Get - asked for new data packet, with nothing available

Usually this signifies that the stream source has not provided any new data so the player has nothing else to display. By default the script calls makemkvcon stream <name of file>. As the documentation for makemkvcon doesn't stipulate what the default cache level was I assumed it was at 128 and set it to 1024 and then 2048 (I have 4G of RAM so there is more than enough). This didn't change the hanging interval very much.

I then decided to hard code it to 128 to see if maybe the opposite would work. It did somewhat as the next time it hung again was about 20 minutes in but it didn't recover like it had before as instead it got stuck permanently in a one second loop. I experienced this with both Yes Man (Jim Carrey movie) and Bruno (Sasha Baron Cohen) blu-rays.

Looking on the xbmc forums (as well as here) it doesn't seem to be happening to others but I have had no luck getting anyone on the other forum to give any advice so I thought to try here.
Any suggestions?

[mike admin]

Can you start MakeMKV (gui) manually, open the disc, start streaming and then open the stream from xbmc? MakeMKV GUI would show how file is accessed and errors (if any).

[rikkards]

I will see if I can do that and get it working.

[rikkards]

Unfortunately XBMC Live doesn't appear to allow you to run both (or it isn't obvious). Also the resolution makes it difficult to read. Is there a way of running makemkv from the command line so it produces the same errors? Or is there a way of better logging in makemkvcon?

[mike admin]

You can run MakeMKV on another computer. Or run makemkvcon with --messages=-stderr --progress=-same to see the progress, but you need to see it in realtime, preferably by launching makemkv via ssh.

[rikkards]

I watched 45 minutes straight of a blu-ray with the --directio=true and no hangups. So I think that fixed it. The next time I have a chance I will try the second option