Periodic lockups with MC9

[K-Wood]

I'm having periodic lockups of my Dell Axim when I'm trying to control MC9. I'm running MC9 beta 107, NetRemote version .97, and WebRemote ver. 1.06 for MJ8 (there is no specific WebRemote for MC9, AFAIK).

The problems occurs when I try to access the Playlist or Now Playing: I tap something and NR just freezes. Only a soft reboot will restore it. It doesn't happen every time -- sometimes everything works perfectly.
I also get inconsistent results with album art retreival in NR.

Can anyone shed any light on this? Is it do to the beta status of MC9? Is it because the latest version of WebRemote is perfectly matched to MC9? Or is a problem with NR?

[QuickCarl]

I am having the same experience.... Not sure what to do about it. Also, Iam on .974 PPC and the buttons to control MC9 (play, pause, next, previous, volume, and all of the feedback) work intermitently.....

[Ben S]

Carl, what is the timeout currently set to in your MJB driver config? It sounds like it may be too low.

I'm going to look into having one connection with MJB similar to how I do it with Girder, but this is probably at least a month off.

K-Wood, are you running 0.974? 974 included timeout values such that if it can't connect at least it won't -bomb- the unit.

The issue lies in that the WebRemote plugin is a touch unstable (which I've been looking into), the TCP/IP connectivity isn't "long lived" (meaning each request to MJB is a new connection), and probably a bug or two in NetRemote.

If you can isolate if the locking up occurs with specific songs in now playing, or whether it's random, that would help me diagnose and fix the problems you're having.

[K-Wood]

Ben:

I am running 0.974 and have my timeout set to 10,000ms. I suspect that the problem does lie in the WebRemote plugin, and perhaps with its interface with MC9. Because MC9 is beta, the problems with it are unpredictable and hard to diagnose.

I have not been able to pinpoint the problem to a particular song or playlist. One thing I have done is eliminate most of the pre-set playlists in MC9, which has helped the problem, but not solved it.

One other strange thing I've noticed is that when I first try to send a command after opening NR, it gives me an error message and then repeatedly resends the command. A couple of times, when a command executes a macro in Girder, it will go into an endless loop of constantly resending the command and executing the Girder macrom, causing me to have to reboot the HTPC to stop it. I ended up putting a "stop processing" command in the Girder multigroup to avoid this.

Any idea why it would try to constantly resend a command, as if the button were being held down?

As for MC9, we may just have to wait for WebRemote to become more stable and for MC9 to move to a final version.

- Ken

[Ben S]

One other strange thing I've noticed is that when I first try to send a command after opening NR, it gives me an error message and then repeatedly resends the command. A couple of times, when a command executes a macro in Girder, it will go into an endless loop of constantly resending the command and executing the Girder macrom, causing me to have to reboot the HTPC to stop it. I ended up putting a "stop processing" command in the Girder multigroup to avoid this.

Any idea why it would try to constantly resend a command, as if the button were being held down?


The issue is that the alert box "takes over control" from the main window, so the main window never gets the "mouse up" event. I'll look into how I can fix this in the future.


As for MC9, we may just have to wait for WebRemote to become more stable and for MC9 to move to a final version.


Unfortunately I'm also the current WebRemote developer. :)

So I need to get both NetRemote and WebRemote more stable!

[QuickCarl]

Ben - I had my teimout set to 2000 milisecs..... changed to 10,000 and it seems to work better.

I did notice that the mulitple connections in the activity screen of web remote are still taking place, seems like that would cause problems of one sort or another.....

I may be wrong but it seems like it used to just make one connection and keep it live....

Thanks for the hint...

[Ben S]

The multiple connections are valid (for now). Each button press and -each- status update (1 a second) will show up in the activity screen of webremote as each of those is a separate connection.

I'm looking to change this in the future, though, as one connection would increase performance.

[Ben S]

Has anyone had better/worse experiences with the newer version of NetRemote (0.98) and the new WebRemote MJB plugin?

[K-Wood]

I've been having better luck with ver. 0.98 of NR, but I'm only on version 9.0.115 of MC9. I'm using the latest version of WebRemote from then -- maybe it is 1.12? I'm not at my HTPC and I don't remember the number. Is there a later version written specifically for MC9? What's the version number?

Thanks,
Ken