VideoCast D/L or playback issues

[cadzilla74]

OK, I'm not sure if this is PodTrapper, my OS, my Storm, Verizon or what ...

Podcasts download and playback fine. Vodcasts have started giving me trouble ever since PodTrapper v.2.16 (I'm on 2.21 now) and I wiped/upgraded my Storm OS to 4.7.167.

VodCasts download fine, or appear to, and are saving to my SD Card as usual in either mp4 or mv4 format which I have never had an issue with. But lately, Vodcasts I have subscribed to for months are giving me an error code 5, playback failed for unknown reason, or they will start and then die as unplayable after a couple of minutes or java null point exception errors ... it's just one thing after another.

These files are also unplayable through the BB media Player so my question is has something changed in the way PodTrapper handles the downloading and storing of Vodcasts, especially ones that are over 50mb? Short ones seem to play OK, but I am also seeing that after watching 3 or 4 short Vodcasts back to back, PodTrapper will fail to Delete one after viewing. If I manually delete it from within PodTrapper it gets completely confused and will not let me watch or listen to anything else without exiting and restating the app.

I also used to get infrequent problems with PT stopping and saying the Media Card is unavailable and I had to do a battery pull. That is happening more often now. At least once a week I wake up expecting all my downloads to be done while the Storm is charging (and the only thing running is PT) and instead I'm sitting there with the "no media card" error instead.

Let me know if you need any more info ... I can capture my Event Log and send it to you when this happens again in case the rather cryptic messages in there are of use to you for troubleshooting.

[marwatk]

Hi there,

I've had a bunch of reports of this on Storm OS .167. It seems the media player in that build is pretty buggy. Unfortunately I can't do anything about it from PodTrapper's end. The only solution is to reinstall the older OS version. Sorry I don't have a better answer for you.

-Marcus

[marwatk]

Follow up on the media card issue (forgot to talk about it). I don't have a enough evidence to say that it's 100% caused by a faulty SD card, but I can say that I haven't had a single user that's experienced it and replaced their card say it's happened again. Somehow the card stops being readable by the OS at all, and it usually happens when a lot of write activity is going on. It could be an OS issue, and users just accept it after replacing their card, but I don't think so. Hope that helps!

-Marcus

[cadzilla74]

Well if it's .167 then there ya have it as far as the buggy media player goes.

I've had a lot of activity on my SD Card in the past 8 months or so. I think I'm going to move everything off it and reformat it. I'm sure it's fragmented as all heck. I did burn a movie with HandBrake to H.264 format. It was almost 3GB and it played perfectly from start to finish so I don't think it is a problem with the card itself.

[mtech]

I'm having video playback issues as well. Haven;t had time to troubleshoot but I'm curious if your .mp4 and .m4v vids are playing now... and if so, what you did. Thanks.

[cadzilla74]

I'm having video playback issues as well. Haven;t had time to troubleshoot but I'm curious if your .mp4 and .m4v vids are playing now... and if so, what you did. Thanks.

I moved everything off my SD card to my PC. I reformatted the card while inserted in the Storm. I also have upgraded to PT v.2.5 but things have been better video-wise since Beta v2.2 series. I also discovered, no idea why, but some of my subscribed vodcasts no longer work on my BB no matter what. Maybe I need to find another feed but they are m4v files but I haven't been able to get a watchable episode of Around the Net from AOTS for over a month. I have unsubscribed. I also noticed I have more trouble with files that have trouble downloading i.e.; lots of starts and stops and small packet sizes seem to make the hashing harder for the device and things don't always get put back together right. I think I may see an improvement in this area now that Marcus told me how to Disable BIS and BES as download sources thereby forcing all downloads to come from Verizon which is about 5 times faster than hitting a RIM server and a far more stable, solid connection (at least for me and where I live).