MediaBox is suddenly freezing

[glug]

Ok, I have happily been using MediaBox for just under a year, but it has suddenly completely stopped working. Whenever I start it how, it loads and seems to work, but doesn't start any playback, and when I switch to the Maemo home screen, I see it is using all my tablet's CPU power. When I retern to MediaBox all I get is a white screen and have to press the escape key to exit.

MediaBox is actually not completely frozen. By using escape and choosing "No" to the option to exit MediaBox, I can scroll though menus and click things, but the screen never redraws itself completely and nothing ever plays.

This started happening after I tried to get MediaBox to display album cover art correcty by unchecking the option "store thumbnails on the same media." I had made this change and everything seemed to be working ok (although the cover art still wasn't displayed correctly). I then used it for a while, and then left leaving MediaBox running (idle, not playing anything) for a few hours. When I came back hours later it was pegging my tablet's CPU to the max and was in the unusable state it remains stuck in.

I have tried re-installing MediaBox, deleating the .mediabox and .thumbnails/mediabox directories from all my memory cards and home directory, all to no avil.

Anyone else have this problem or can think of a solution? I'm grateful for any help. I like MediaBox, but I am out of ideas as to why its suddenly stopped working. Thanks.

-Ethan

[pycage]

It would be interesting to know if the CPU is at max also when letting MediaBox run idle without having played any media after startup. Just start MediaBox and put the tablet aside for an hour. If the problem remains, try the same with the tablet in offline mode to see if the hanging was caused by some badly behaving UPnP device on the network.

Running MediaBox from X-Terminal with
MediaBox -vvv

or if you have python-launcher installed
python2.5 /usr/bin/MediaBox -vvv

might give a clue.

I don't think that unchecking "store thumbnails on the same media" has much to do with it, unless perhaps your filesystem ran out of space due too many thumbnails in your home folder now.

[glug]

Well, I think the problem was UPnP.

I misread your post and ran MediaBox where I had no internet connection (although not in ofline mode), and all problems stopped. Brought it back online, and its still working fine! Sees my UPnP device (MediaTomb) fine too.

Strangely, though, I have never had problems with MediaBox with this UPnP server before, and have used them togeather sucessfully, and I havn't changed the server any.

MediaBox *still* doesn't display album art when browsing by album. It does display (most) of it when browing by artist, though. But I'm glad the major problem seems fixed. Hopefully the album art will work in a future release.

I can post output from MediaBox -vvv if you'd like, but nothing eventfull there, except some errors in the beginning of the output about a jpeg loader failing without error... its scrolled out of the window now and I can't see it, though.

Thanks for the suggestions and (MediaBox) pycage. I guess its working now!

[pycage]

The jpeg loader error is not critical. It means that a jpeg image is corrupted, or too large. It could also mean that some embedded album art contains invalid data.

Album art display will hopefully work better with 0.96.5.

MediaTomb may not be the only UPnP device in your network. Many routers offer a UPnP interface, too. Running MediaBox with -vvv, you can see what's going on on the UPnP SSDP broadcasting layer. UPnP is like a market place. Every device is shouting "I'm here!", until it gets some attention. :)