The first attempt to play will stutter more so than subsequent attempts because the contents of RAM must be swapped out. Not much can be done on the ancient aTV1 to alleviate this.
Sam
Its not stuttering, it displays the loading prompt, then simply returns to the video menu.
I understand the ram swapping, but it doesnt even get as far as displaying video
What does the log say when this happens?
Ill prepare logs shortly, I was attempting to play a movie and it just bombed on me again.
The video playback problems are actually much less annoying then not being able to scroll through my library. I have a huge library and if I rapidly scroll through my list it will crash and reboot rather predictably. Ill get that log first.
Here is the log I just created. I made the apple TV crash simply by scrolling through my library
You are reaching the limitations of a device with limited memory unfortunately.
You can slow down performance, but reduce crashes. You can look at increasing the swap file on your device and by editing:
vm.swappiness=30
in /etc/sysctl.d/101-osmc-device.conf.
I’d be interested if you can find a ‘good’ value.
To increase swap file:
sudo swapoff /swap
sudo rm /swap
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=256
chmod 0600 /swap
mkswap /swap
sudo swapon /swap
Try changing the swap file first.
Also: try using a less heavy skin!
I was just able to reproduce the behavior using the default OSMC skin.
Ill try modifying the swap next.
No Joy on any tweaking.
My library is just too big. I guess Ill just have to buy something with more horsepower. Hard to find a replacement with an Optical out these days though.
How is big? A challenge can be fun sometimes 
Make sure things like ‘Extract thumbnails from video’ etc is disabled. You could look at decreasing the resolution of scraped images in advancedsettings.xml. Also check what protocol you’re using. FTP will provide the least overhead, NFS is also good. SMB is a bad choice on aTV1.
texturecache.py may also help.
Sam
Well if you have an optical connection I guess your AVR also have a coaxial SPDIF. Then the Vero2 would be an option for you. If you really need an optical out then RPI3 + Hifiberry Digi is your option.
Ive been looking at an Rpi3 with Hifiberry actually. I just swapped out the apple TV for a first gen Rpi model A I had laying around it its working flawlessly with analog Audio for now. Fresh install of OSMC.
This receiver only has optical. no SPDIF
Well if you are a Retro Person (seems so with an ATV1) get a used Vero1 that had Optical out as far a I remember
SQL Library because I share it between 2 Apple TV’s and 2 Raspberry Pi’s and 3 computers.
1600+ Movies
38000+ TV Episodes
16 TB worth of Video alone
I’m hardly retro, just cheap lol. Ive been using the Apple TV’s for 4+ years as it cost me less than $120 Canadian to set two of them up at the time.
Im going to replace the Living Room and TV Room Apple TV’s with Nvidia Shields for Kodi (and gaming), the rest of the house will use Raspberry Pi’s
Hi Sam,
I don’t have a huge library (70 movies and 500 eposodes) but my atv is very unstable too.
It crashes very often usually when stopping video or starting streams but also when searching for artwork.
I have a light skin (Eminence 2).
The stability problem raised after kodi 16, with 15 the system was pretty stable.
Every time I had the chance to monitor the atv with top command while reproducing the issues I saw the free swap dropping to 0.
I will try your suggestions about smb.
My Pi3 + Hifiberry Digi+ arrived today. Holy crap is that thing fast. I feel like an idiot for waiting so long, it is worlds apart from my Pi1 a+ 256mb and the Apple TV.
I should note that after testing this same set of issues with the following I could consistently reproduce the same (or similar issues) on:
Apple TV: rapid scrolling through library would cause the Apple TV to run out of memory and restart
Raspberry Pi 1 A+ 256mb: rapid scrolling through library would cause thumbnails to stop rendering, analog audio stop responding, and any attempt to play a video would trigger an endless wait state. Rebooting via the shutdown menu before playing media would resolve this.
Raspberry Pi 1 A+ 512mb: rapid scrolling would eventually cause a wait/pause but would rarely ever cause a crash (only happened once and I think it was actually a power supply issue)
Raspberry Pi 3 + Hifiberry Digi+: rapid scrolling does not cause any problems.
All boxes running Amber 2.2.7 for a skin
All tests were performed using the April build of OSMC for the older boxes. I built the Pi 3 using the may release. I can retest with a fresh install from this weekend if anyone wants detailed logs on the older platforms.
Personally I think it seems to indicate that there is something in the Jarvis release that is much less swap friendly, or simply exceeding the limited memory of the 256mb platforms. Even the 512mb Pi runs pretty solidly.