Vero 4K+ interface stops responding with autofs

Help and Support
1

I have previously successfully set up a SMB sharing scheme from my Windows 10 machine using autofs. I now have the following issue - suppose I am watching a film from the SMB share (Vero is a client). Now, in order:

  1. I pause the movie and turn my TV off.
  2. I switch my Windows machine, thus killing the source of the movie for Vero.
  3. I go to sleep, come back the following day.
  4. I turn on the Windows machine, make sure the folder is being shared correctly.
  5. I turn the TV on and…
    Vero is stuck on the ‘paused screen’ from (1). It’s not responding to the remote. I can login via SSH though - when I invoke a reboot via SSH, Vero takes a while to switch itself off: in particular it takes 3 minutes to ‘dismount’ the SMB share (I can see this output on my TV).

I have a proposed workaround to the problem - I now set my Vero to ‘suspend’ after 10 minutes of inactivity. Since this properly stops the playback (rather than pauses it), I believe it will likely solve the problem. It’s a workaround though - can we think of something more proper?

3

Have you tries restarting autofs?

sudo systemctl restart autofs
4

you need to look at your mount options - i use hard,timeo=60,retrans=2 and a few others and never have a problem

5

Use stop instead of pause. When you click play next day you automatically can resume from where you stopped before. Otherwise your file handle will not be released.

6

I have not tried it - but a ‘good’ solution to the problem cannot require logging in via SSH every time the problem occurs.

I’m not sure how changing these parameters from default will result in anything else - retrans is set to 3 by default (what’s the difference between 2 retries and 3 retries to my problem?), and timeo will only change the increment between the retries (default is 600 I think).

This is a solution - I agree, but you are esentially saying ‘do not use the pause function, just in case you dismount the SMB share’, which is not a ‘good’ solution either. :slight_smile:

Can anyone think of a clever cron job that would release the handles when paused for too long? If I can access the time played of the file currently being played, as well as its name from terminal level, I can imagine I could run a job like this - every 10 minutes check whether you are paused at the same timestamp as the last time you checked. If so, press ‘stop’, as per your solution @fzinken. Ideas?

7

Well it’s the only proper way to release the file handle so it’s the only ‘good’ solution.

2 Likes
8

You could probably do a script in python that uses the Kodi JSON interface and check what is playing. After X minutes of pause then stop the play.

Seems like a lot of work when just a simple stop would do it :wink: Or even better not shutting down the file server, because file servers are there to ahem, serve files?!

1 Like
9

Might be the same issue I had. This was my workaround: