Black screen on certain HD channels

    Hi folks

    I have a number of Kodi-based devices around my house on various platforms, all connecting to a TVHeadend backend providing DVB-T/2 and DVB-S/2 channels (alligned to the Sky UK EPG structure).

    One client in particular is giving me grief - it's the LibreELEC client running on a new Raspberry Pi 3.

    Certain channels (namely the BBC Olympic HD channels and CBeebies HD) return only a blank screen. I can see that data is being served to the client (via HTSP) from TVHeadend but no sound/video is displayed. If I show the stats overlay on top of the blank screen, it shows that Kodi is receiving data (including the bitrate of the stream) but there are no match/phase/pll stats for the channel.

    Eventually, Kodi crashes and restarts but I can find nothing useful in the logs.

    I'm running LibreELEC 7.0.2 and TVHeadend git-master (bang up to date). I don't think TVHeadend is the problem as if I use other Kodi clients (not LibreELEC) the channels work fine, same for streaming via mobile and the TVHeadend web UI.

    I'm using omx hardware acceleration and I have deinterlace and deinterlace method both set to auto.

    I've attached screenshots of a "good" HD stream and a "bad" one (both are FTA and both from Astra 28.2).

    Please ignore the 'CBeebies HD has moved' EPG entry - that's coming from the EPG data for the DVB-T variant which I've unmapped now (whilst the Olympics are on the HD variant on DVB-T has been removed/scaled back).

    Edited once, last by DJBenson (August 14, 2016 at 12:59 PM).

    I'm having the same problem - I have a mixture of Pi1 B+ and PI2 machines all running LibreElec 7.0.2 and none of them will play CBeebies HD. I thought at first that it was something to do with the retune that happened recently but it seems to run fine on a Kodi instance running on Windows 7. My backend is running MythTv 0.27 and I'm using TBS cards to grab from Freesat so I thought perhaps there was an issue with the PVR addon, however I tried creating a short recording of CBeebies HD and again it runs fine on Kodi on Windows 7 but won't run on any of my PIs. The file also seems to run fine on VLC on windows so it doesn't look like there's anything particularly wrong with the file itself.

    When I get a chance I'm going to try to grab some logs and other info. My 3yr old hasn't noticed that he's watching CBeebies in SD yet..

    I'm glad this isn't just me.
    I think there's something CODEC related that the RPi hardware acceleration doesn't like because if you turn OMXplayer or MMAL off (in Settings/Player/Video) the affected streams will actually play albeit very slowly.

    EDIT: Here is the CODEC information from the stream that won't play

    And this is from one that plays fine:

    Edited once, last by markius (August 19, 2016 at 12:27 AM).

    So popcornmix came up with a fix for this over at the RPi LibreElec thread: LibreELEC Testbuilds for RaspberryPi (Kodi 17.0)


    Add the following to advancedsetting.xml

    Code
    <advancedsettings>
    <omx>
        <omxdecodestartwithvalidframe>0</omxdecodestartwithvalidframe>
    </omx>
</advancedsettings>

    Worked for me on the Olympics HD streams. Just in time for the closing ceremony.

    Edited once, last by markius (August 21, 2016 at 10:31 PM).

    Quote from markius


    So popcornmix came up with a fix for this over at the RPi LibreElec thread: LibreELEC Testbuilds for RaspberryPi (Kodi 17.0)


    Add the following to advancedsetting.xml

    Code
    <advancedsettings>
    <omx>
        <omxdecodestartwithvalidframe>0</omxdecodestartwithvalidframe>
    </omx>
</advancedsettings>

    Worked for me on the Olympics HD streams. Just in time for the closing ceremony.

    Superb. Works for CBeebies HD as well.