Monthly Archive for November, 2011

Crystalbuntu: No November update

Published on November 29, 2011 in General and News. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Sorry to inform you that I cannot put out an update this month. I have deferred it until December at the earliest. My reason for not being able to deliver the update is due to my heart problems which I now know to be caused by mitral regurgitation. This has occupied my time significantly this month and meant that I have not had enough time to deliver what I would consider a quality update.

Thank you for your understanding.

Broadcom CrystalHD (BCM70015) only $19.50

Published on November 23, 2011 in General and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: .

If you haven’t got a Broadcom CrystalHD card yet, Logic Supply are giving them away at a discounted $19.95 for US residents. Grab one here.

Crystalbuntu and XBMC: recent issues

Published on November 5, 2011 in General and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Hello everyone,

It’s not been a good couple of weeks for the XBMC at all. First, we had the MySQL issues plaguing users with multiseat setups which resulted in the preliminary update (not exclusive to the PVR branch), and then we had an issue where the PVR system constantly tried to remove entries from the EPG. I’d like to thank Bharath for pointing this one out, which he found through increased heat output from the AppleTV. The problems caused were:

  • Excessive hard drive usage
    • Bad IO throughput, resulting in degraded performance of XBMC and plugins
    • Hard drive could not standby due to permanent usage
    • Heat output was great due to hard drive in constant activity.

A quick scouring of a debug log and PVR branch led me to the conclusion that recent changes to XBMC was causing an infinite loop. While this has not been resolved in the PVR branch, I have patched the offending source code to fix the issue and raised an issue report on Github here

Users should see an increase in performance almost immediately. Please bare in mind these issues are not the result of incompetence, either on Team XBMC’s part or my own. The fact is that issues can arise in using nightly builds on a bespoke platform. What I feel makes the difference, is how quickly a response is made to the problem and how it is dealt with. I am starting to see the need for Crystalbuntu to perhaps get its own XBMC repository.

Please restart your AppleTV for resolution of these issues.

Crystalbuntu: Preliminary November update

Published on November 3, 2011 in General and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

A little early, but nonetheless of utmost importance. The current XBMC PVR build in Crystalbuntu has caused issues with users that were using MySQL. Synchronisation errors occured because late October builds were producing new tables (MyVideos56, MyMusic56) rather than using the existing tables (MyVideos, MyMusic). All users can receive the updated build which fixes this by restarting their Apple TV immediately. Furthermore, I am pleased to announce I have refined the update system and users will find the Crystalbuntu server faster due to optimisations.