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Tivo Desktop 2.5, Vista issue with mp3 playback

Discussion in 'TiVo Home Media Features & TiVoToGo' started by JoJetSki, Sep 10, 2007.

  1. Sep 10, 2007 #1 of 11
    JoJetSki

    JoJetSki Member

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    Jul 24, 2006
    I have Tivo Desktop 2.5 plus installed on 32bit Vista (no issues with the install).

    I have transfered a Divx movie to my Series 2 with no problems.

    I do however have problems playing my MP3 files. I used Tivo Desktop on my XP machines for years using these same MP3's with no problems. However during playback from the Vista machine some songs will play about halfway through and the time length bar will come up on the TV screen and the green playback arrow will turn yellow and the song will stop for a bit. Then (most of the time) the song will start to play for about 5 seconds and then skip to the next song.

    If I rewind a song that had stopped and then skip it will happen at a different point in the song. Some songs of the alblum will play all the way through others will do the stop and skip. If I turn up my old XP machine (the only reason I had it was for the tivo desktop software) everything works fine with the same MP3's.

    Has anyone tried to listen to a set of 10 songs and gone all the way through?

    The Vista machine is not going into a power save mode or anything like that.

    Any thoughts?
     
  2. Sep 10, 2007 #2 of 11
    Dan203

    Dan203 Super Moderator Staff Member TCF Club

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    The yellow arrow indicates a network buffer problem. This could be caused by a lot of things including the hard drive falling asleep, an indexing service kicking in and causing excessive disk activity, another service over saturating your network, your network interface falling asleep, etc... The easiest way to test for such a thing would be to start playing the same files then actively do something light on the PC like surf the web. If the files play fine all the way through then some sort of inactivity delayed process is causing the TiVo software to stall while playing. If it still has the problem then the most likely culprit is either your network or your firewall.

    Dan
     
  3. Sep 11, 2007 #3 of 11
    ACraigL

    ACraigL Member

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    Feb 12, 2003
    I have exactly this problem, but it did not surface (for me) until the last service update from TiVo. I've done all manner of troubleshooting on this (CPU usage, network activity/sniffing, disabling services, etc) with no single identifier of the cause.

    I switched from Galleon (removed altogether) to JRiver Media Center as my music server and things have gotten better, but not perfect. My experiences are random since the swtch... the first song may pause, and the next 20 play through no problem. It seems like the TiVo chokes on the information, since its more prevalent when the TiVo is recording something.

    Keep digging in and reporting your findings... I believe this to be a TiVo issue, but perhaps only in conjuction with Vista as you have found.

    Andrew
     
  4. Sep 11, 2007 #4 of 11
    ACraigL

    ACraigL Member

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    Feb 12, 2003
  5. Sep 11, 2007 #5 of 11
    JoJetSki

    JoJetSki Member

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    Jul 24, 2006
    Thanks for that thread.

    I know it's not the network because nothing has changed and if I bring up my old XP machine with Tivo desktop 2.4 my music streams fine.

    My Vista machine sits idle when I am trying to do this so it probably isn't that but I can't rule it out yet. I have my music separated into folders by CD so it is only keeping track of 10 songs or so.

    To me, the weird thing is that it is not just pausing but after the pause it will skip to the end of the song and start playing the next song. Thats more than a buffer issue in that if it was a pure buffer issue the song would just pause and then start playing from where it paused.

    Also I have been able to stream DIVX files with no problem so it would appear to be only in the music department.

    Hopefully a 2.5.1 will come out to fix the problem.
     
  6. Sep 11, 2007 #6 of 11
    ACraigL

    ACraigL Member

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    Here's something to try... when the music pauses, click the replay button and see if it continues properly from there. For me, in almost all cases, it does.
     
  7. Sep 11, 2007 #7 of 11
    Dan203

    Dan203 Super Moderator Staff Member TCF Club

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    If your adventurous you could try this... Go to your XP machine and copy the Mp3.dll file from the TiVo Desktop folder under C:\Program Files to a disk, USB key, etc... Then go to the Vista machine. Stop TiVo Desktop and TiVo Server completely. Now go to C:\Program Files\TiVo\Desktop on that machine and rename the Mp3.dll to something like Mp3.hld, then copy the Mp3.dll form the disk. USB key, etc... to the folder. If TiVo made a change to their MP3 decoder from version 2.4 to 2.5 that would be the file where the change occurred and that could fix it. If it doesn't work for any reason then delete the copied file and simply rename the .hld file to .dll

    Dan
     
  8. Sep 12, 2007 #8 of 11
    ACraigL

    ACraigL Member

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    Would Galleon use the same dll file? I saw the same issues under Galleon without TD even installed.
     
  9. Sep 12, 2007 #9 of 11
    Dan203

    Dan203 Super Moderator Staff Member TCF Club

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    No. Galleon used it's own MP3 decoder.

    Dan
     
  10. Sep 13, 2007 #10 of 11
    ACraigL

    ACraigL Member

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    Right, so it's unlikely that the "adventurous" test will work, given my experience.
     
  11. Sep 13, 2007 #11 of 11
    CuriousMark

    CuriousMark Forum Denizen

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    Are you storing lyrics and album art in the MP3's? Maybe there is just so much that the server software is getting confused or choking on it. You could look at the size of the tags and if it only pauses on the songs with the largest tags, that might be a clue. Or perhaps a tag with special characters could be the choke point.

    I thought I would throw out these wild guesses, feel free to ignore them if they don't seem helpful.

    CuriousMark
     

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