ATV suddenly locking up while playing videos

[rogersmj]

My hacked ATV has been humming along find for about 9 months now. I use it to play various video files that are stored on my main Mac via a mounted Samba share.

Just today, it started freezing up while playing videos. It doesn't matter what file it is...at some point, typically within 1 to 3 minutes of playing, it just stutters for a second and then completely freezes. I reboot, go back to the video I was watching, FF to where I was, and then it will happen again 1 to 3 minutes down the line. This has happened on MPG, DiVX, and XviD files that have always played 100% fine before.

It seems symptomatic of either a hard drive failure in the ATV or a network problem. But since it's hardwired into a gigabit network, and none of my other equipment seems to be having network issues, I'm leaning toward hard drive failure in the ATV. I put my ear next to it while it was running (and freezing) to see if I could hear anything, but since the ATV drive is so quiet and I'd never listened to it before it was hard to tell if what I heard was normal seek operations or the clicking of a dying drive.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to diagnose this? I can't live without my ATV.

 

[tom1971]

which version is your ATV on?
To me it looks more liek an access problem of your share

 

[rogersmj]

2.0

Ok I just confirmed it has something to do with the network share. I copied a Raymond episode to the ATV's hard drive via SFTP and was able to watch the whole thing without any trouble. Fired it up over the network...and it locked up again. This is really weird. I haven't changed any network configurations or run any software updates on either the ATV or my Mac that hosts the files.

 

[rogersmj]

Well I rebooted everything (Mac and ATV) and for awhile everything seemed fine. My wife and I watched a couple TV episodes without a problem. Then we started up a movie, and got 75% of the way through it and suddenly the problem started up again.

I am at a loss. I guess the next thing to do will be to setup a share on a different Mac, connect the ATV to that, and see if the problem persists. It's hard to replicate consistently though.

 

[macleod199]

It could be a heat problem, too, if it's summer where you are. Most modern processors downclock themselves rather than melt.

 

[msantoso]

i'm also experience lock up in videos, but i realised that network performance in 10.5.4 decreases bandwidth. Previously i get 700Kb/s-1,2Mb/s. Now it's only around 100-200kb/s so it's stuttering the playback. Even for tv shows.

I upgraded to 2.1 yesterday, but sometimes it still exist. Maybe i need to upgrade my router to AE 802.11n and hopefully everything is going to be fine.