Storm lockup during Vodcast playback.

[cadzilla74]

Isolated incident? Subscribed Vodcast "Best Ads on TV". Latest download is a 9+ minute video. PT stalled during play back at around the 7 minute mark twice. Both times required a battery pull to recover. Stalled in the same spot in BBMP but I was able to close the BBMP and delete the obviously corrupt file from my SD card. Just wondering why PT totally froze the Storm instead of letting me have some control to shut down the app or back out of the bad file? Just updated today to PT 2.6.7.

[marwatk]

Hmm, I think I have an issue with video handling somewhere, but I'm still tracking it down. Though it may just be the media player, not sure.

Next time you see it happen can you try holding alt and typing 'QUIT'? That's a back door that should force PodTrapper closed in all cases (it's listening on all screens and modes). If that doesn't work there's likely not much I can do to free it up.

-Marcus

[cadzilla74]

The Storm has no physical keyboard. When the playback froze it was stuck in still-frame display of the offending Vodcast file. Since none of the 4 physical buttons responded (phone, BB button,back button,hang up phone) I had no choice but to pull the battery.

[marwatk]

Oh yeah, whoops. That's not going to help much on the storm. Next time it happens can you try calling it and see if you get the tone from your ringtone?

-Marcus

[cadzilla74]

It has happened a few times now. PT actually exited once with a 227 error code "PT not responding". Phone was usable but PT would not play anything again until a battery pull. This only happens with Vodcasts. I also noticed short Vodcasts would play through but would get progressively worse insofar as audio and video getting out of synch. Larger files would just crash. I have now turned OFF buffering in PT and the problem seems to have gone away. So I can only assume at this point that once the initial buffering of a file has occurred the buffer is not being refreshed fast enough to maintain smooth playback. Just a guess on my part but that's how it appears. No files of any size have locked up since I turned off buffering. But now I'm afraid to allow downloads while playing since that used to cause SD Card errors. I can live with that though.

[marwatk]

Hmm, ok. My guess there is that the video is just in the realm of what the bb is capable of playing, and the added complexity of preloading and copying around the data puts it over the edge. I'll have to think about what I can do in that case, or if I can even detect it. Thanks for doing all of the troubleshooting...

-Marcus

[cadzilla74]

Glad to help with any info I can. And I don't mind trying out PT Betas since they always work properly except for occasional minor glitches. I never worry that I'll install one and my Storm will leak the "magic blue smoke". Last night I watched half a dozen Vodcasts averaging 15 minutes each in length and not a single one got out of audio-video synch and none of them stalled. Even when incoming BB Messages and e-mails interrupted playback PT just resumed correctly after the interruption. I think I'm bumping up against hardware limitations at this point. I think a bottleneck is the read-write speed between the Storm and the SD Card. I might even move everything off the card and reformat it since I have been moving tons of data to/from it on a weekly basis for over a year. It seems like the buffering issue while downloading is very similar to the playback while downloading issue I had before. Same symptoms, different cause, all pointing back to read/write speed to SD storage if I had to guess.

Anyways, the Storm 1 is old news, grossly underpowered and short on memory. I am still quite satisfied with mine as I have it tweaked to the max and have not seen any new apps I "can't live without" so overall my device is very stable (as stable as it can be with 43 apps installed and booting up with only 18.5mb of available RAM). I doubt I'll even see another OS update for it. Come September my Verizon contract will be up for renewal and I will be looking for new hardware. The Storm 2 doesn't impress me as a giant leap forward over what I have now. Unless there is a Storm 3 on the horizon (and RIM gets their act together OS-wise) I may be going to an Android OS device. Whatever new hardware I pick up PT will be the first app installed. (And my wife would kill me if we lost Honeydew so that would be second).

[marwatk]

Guess i need to really work on PT and HD for android, heh.

-Marcus

[bill724]

As someone who had both a Storm1 and Storm2, the Storm2 is a lot better in a lot of ways. That said, I'm having similar video issues, so I'll try your fix with the buffering settings and see if my problem goes away, too. Thanks for digging into that one.

And Marcus, you're allowed to develop for Android "too" as long as you don't forget about your BlackBerry customers and supporters!

- Bill.

[bill724]

Marcus,

I was having trouble with PT on my Storm 2 (video playback lockups, etc), then I got a new SW load for the Storm 2 and it stopped playing back altogether. I updated to 2.6.7 (I was on 2.5.x) and changed the settings to not buffer the playback. Now everything is working perfectly. Thanks for the tip and thanks to Cadzill74 for digging into it.

- Bill.

[cadzilla74]

Marcus,

I was having trouble with PT on my Storm 2 (video playback lockups, etc), then I got a new SW load for the Storm 2 and it stopped playing back altogether. I updated to 2.6.7 (I was on 2.5.x) and changed the settings to not buffer the playback. Now everything is working perfectly. Thanks for the tip and thanks to Cadzill74 for digging into it.

- Bill.

Glad to be of help. I'm confident if you watch Vodcasts with buffering OFF on Storm 1 or 2 with OS 5.xx you will be OK. I watched a few more today and not a dropped frame in a carload. However, just as a heads up, what I mentioned in my previous post .... before Marcus introduced the Buffering capability I was running into issues where I was watching Vodcasts while charging. I also had PT set to allow downloads "while charging and during playback".

I would normally be able to watch only one or two Vodcasts while PT was downloading in the background simultaneously before I got an error "cannot read SD Card". If I then went into Applications>File and tried to view the contents of my SD Card my Storm could no longer even read it and it required a battery pull to recover. At this point, I just make sure all my Vodcasts load while on the charger while I sleep. Once I've watched the pre-downloaded ones I move onto listening to Podcasts which are far less demanding data-wise and then I either use PT to listen to an audio-book or I fire up Slacker or Pandora and listen to tunes. I just have to resign myself to the fact that even though the Storm is able to multi-task, the OS defintiely has some limitations when it comes to writing to the SD Card while reading from it at the same time.

I'm almost tempted to buy a better SD card for my Storm to see if the transfer rate limitation is being caused by a cheap OEM card vs an OS bottleneck. I'm definitely going to reformat my current card this weekend and reload it just to see if I have a fragmentation issue although your Storm 2, being much newer than my Storm 1, should not have any frag issues yet.