Solution to XBMC idle hanging problem

As per this thread on the XBMC forums, I was for a long time having problems with XBMC hanging when idle.  On average about once a day for the last 6 months - very very annoying.  And no solution - until now!

The solution is to work around the buggy smb mounting code in XBMC that creates these hangs and also, in general, doesn't play so nicely with Windows 7 shares.  Instead, we use 'autofs' to mount the shares locally into a mount point within the XBMCLive Ubuntu outside of XBMC itself - this way the shares appear to XBMC as local folders, and the hangs disappear!

Here's the solution:

In a terminal (e.g. a putty connection), you must:

Create an entry in /etc/hosts for your server

eg.

192.168.1.51 homeserver

Then:

sudo apt-get install smbclient
sudo apt-get install smbfs
sudo apt-get install

(this installs the appropriate packages for automounting shares)

Add to /etc/auto.master

Code:

/smb    /etc/auto.smb --timeout=60

Create /etc/auto.smb.yourservername

Code:

username=yourusername
password=yourpassword

Restart autofs

Code:

sudo service autofs restart

Your shares can now be accessed via /smb/yourservername/...

(That is, to list them, you need to 'ls  /smb/youservername/' - if you just 'ls /smb/' you won't see the shares as they are mounted on demand!)

You must also remove ANY references to your old smb shares in XBMC.

Goto the folder: /home/#XBMCUSER/.xbmc/userdata, Edit sources.xml
Remove any source that has "smb://" in it. In my case I did a replace of smb://#USER@..../ to /mnt/share/.... since I've mounted all my shares on my box.

Then edit passwords.xml
Remove your smb passwords

Last edit mediasources.xml
And also remove the share there.

This solution completely eliminates the hangs.  It is needed for Dharma as well as the hanging issue remains as of Beta2 for Dharma.


Another nice thing about this solution is that browsing to shares seem quicker in general this way.