Found it it's something to do with the memory, it was spitting out errors about being full but the SD card is basically empty still.  Need to figure out how to fix

Check the output of 'df -h'
Could be that it's not the sdcard but some tmpfs is full or SOMETHING

Does this happen even after rewriting the sdcard or you haven't tried that yet??

Just did a new install of OpenELEC, black screen.  Can ssh into it, where's the video config file?

/boot/config.txt

Set hdmi_mode=4 for 720p

other modes shown here
http://elinux.org/RPiconfig

Back on 720, my TV is just finnicky and I often have to cycle through inputs before it detects the pi again

Now Input/output errors when starting up

dmesg | tail results

[74137.494801] Sense Key : Hardware Error [current]
[74137.494805] sd 5:0:0:0: >[sdb] 
[74137.494808] Add. Sense: No additional sense information
[74137.494811] sd 5:0:0:0: >[sdb] CDB:
[74137.494813] Read(10): 28 00 00 74 5e 70 00 00 08 00
[74137.494823] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 7626352
[74137.494828] Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 953294
[74151.213290] EXT4-fs (sdb2): #blocks per group too big: 34816
[74158.543567] EXT4-fs (sdb2): #blocks per group too big: 34816
[74230.776364] EXT4-fs (sdb2): #blocks per group too big: 34816

EDIT: I am so tired that I am just going to assume the card is bad.  How good does my card need to be?  RadioShack has a decent deal right now: http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=11100084

Hmm sounds like it.

Class 4 Sandisk is fine, that's what I have!!

That's only class 2! I'll get a faster one

Oh the picture has a 4 on it!!
I have a 2 GB sdcard that's class 2,that also works fine for OpenELEC

Oh well now I am confused, I was going to buy a class 10!!

Bought a class 10 8GB card, added TV shows and WOW is it going fast!!

LIBRARY DONE ALREADY WOW