FiveNinjas Slice LibreELEC preview build

    • Official Post
    Quote from bleep42

    I've installed 8.1.0 all seems to be good except LED patterns, some work, others like fast rewind and the shutting down red pattern do not, all of the .png patterns seem to be present in /usr/share/kodi/addons/service.slice/resources/media/ledpatterns/ although I thought they used to be in /usr/share/kodi/media/ledpatterns ?

    The location of LED patterns has changed because they are now part of the embedded slice.service add-on. I saw some LED issues when I first updated to early versions of the 8.1.0 image where patterns weren't playing right, but I strongly suspect that was due to an install that had became messed-up from testing and with too much background stuff going on (and using WIFI, which seems to make the Slice box suck). Since I clean reinstalled to the eMMC for boot testing and went back to Ethernet, it's been fine.

    Quote from chewitt

    The location of LED patterns has changed because they are now part of the embedded slice.service add-on. I saw some LED issues when I first updated to early versions of the 8.1.0 image where patterns weren't playing right, but I strongly suspect that was due to an install that had became messed-up from testing and with too much background stuff going on (and using WIFI, which seems to make the Slice box suck). Since I clean reinstalled to the eMMC for boot testing and went back to Ethernet, it's been fine.

    Hi Chewitt,

    Thanks for replying, I have tried downgrading back to 8.0.2 and back to 8.1.0 three times and get the same results, I usually use Ethernet anyway.

    Roger back on the five ninja forum is also seeing the same thing.

    Any pointers would be appreciated.

    Regards,

    Kevin.

    • Official Post

    For kicks (and if you don't mind) .. make a backup and move off-box; then clean install to the eMMC again and selectively restore the essential bits (sources.xml etc.) from the backup file. If that works we can take another willing victim and see what bits of their Kodi install can be pruned before things start to work right. I have a completely unfounded hunch/suspicion that Kodi image caching is involved.

    Quote from chewitt

    For kicks (and if you don't mind) .. make a backup and move off-box; then clean install to the eMMC again

    Hi chewitt and bleep42

    I did not mind and I have done a reflash of eMMC and reloaded 8.1.0. I used the Libreelec USB SD creator for windows to download the SLICE3 image and then copy it to the Slice. Added music library (000's of FLAC files)

    All appeared OK at first, default sound was HDMI (did not test sound output) but asked it to play, pause and stop. LEDs seemed correct. asked it to power off and the red/yellow sequence was kind of OK but stopped and restarted several times and the power on again was fine (blue leds).

    Changed audio to Pi analog LEDS nearest power socket came on (two one blue and one green): unexpected!! No audio (expected).

    Changed to ALSA Default(snd_slice Analogue) and got sound (expected) .

    Cycle power

    play music, green leds flash at start of track, all go out and a short while later the LED nearest the power socket comes on and remains on (green). Next track starts and green LED sequence is normal, all go out and a short time later the single LED (green) comes back on again.

    Reboot, the red / yellow LEDs have several attempts at the sequence (get to the corner) pause, restart sequence and proceed to end.

    Play music, LED green sequence plays at start of track.... no green LED on after. Next track starts and sequence of green OK and no green LED on after.

    reboot and the power off sequence is OK but for the half sequence and then the whole sequence on power down

    power off and remove power then restart. The sequence at power off is slightly different from reboot in behaviour: it pauses for a little longer just before the corner is reached then restarts and completes normally. At this time the hard disk is making a noise (powering off, perhaps?)

    Reboot and it is fine, all seems to work normally.

    What is different: no TV headend42, VNC, openweathermap and no playlists.

    All a bit strange!

    I will "rinse and repeat" and report back

    Roger

    Thanks for doing that Roger,

    I'm a bit busy at present, so would have had problems doing a clean install.

    On my Slice, I occasionally get a whitish flash of the LEDs at shutdown, not long red/Orange like it should be.

    Do you get anything at all for Fast Rewind? I don't.

    It may be my imagination, but the one long sequence (start up) I do get seems different, maybe faster?

    Regards,

    Kevin.

    Hi Chewitt

    Test 2

    DownloadedSlice3.arm-8.1.0.image.gz from downloads page (rather than using the image from last time)

    reloaded to eMMC, booted and re-scanned music files. I have enabled SSH and am running PuTTY and TOP to see what is going on, as in the previous test.

    Try playing audio with default interface (HDMI) plays OK according to the screens but not tested audio.

    Set audio to ALSA. Play music and LEDs seem OK during play, pause and stop. Once the single green LED came on after the end of the play sequence and then went out a second or so later.

    REBOOT: the LED sequence stops at the end of the lines and restarts.

    During the power up sequence (and I thought I saw it before in the previous test) there are random red / green white flashes, while the expected blues etc are being displayed.

    Rebooted and tested again, same thing with the startup LEDS, random not normal colours.

    POWER OFF and remove power plug (this is important, I think......)

    ..... and everything seems to work as it should.... I am assuming that the power off LED sequence works but restarts some way through is a "bug" as the shutdown.png is a single decreasing line of red / yellow LEDS, but it really does not matter. The important thing is that it shows the pattern as an indicator of power off state.

    The moral is: load a new version and then do a power off reset of the box and all will be OK.... possibly.

    Be interesting to see if bleep42 finds the same.

    Any thoughts / observations / other tests you would like done?

    Roger

    Quote from bleep42

    On my Slice, I occasionally get a whitish flash of the LEDs at shutdown, not long red/Orange like it should be.

    bleep42 we kind of "crossed in the post"

    I will go and test on my main box, and see if the problem exists without doing the clean install... I would rather the upgrade process worked. I cannot recall if I have done a power off reset on that box as I just did the update remotely dumping the .tar with SCP and rebooting.

    Let you know....

    Roger

    • Official Post

    The update process only replaces files in /flash it does not touch /storage in any way. So update vs. clean install is all about Kodi caching or config and not the type of update file used or the actual update process.

    I've seen the random green LED (nearest power socket) a few times on both 8.0.2 and 8.1.0 and I have no clue. I'm wondering if some extra blank pixels need to be added to ensure the LED's are cleared in some scenarios?

    Quote from bleep42

    Do you get anything at all for Fast Rewind? I don't.

    Kevin,

    Happy to help, bit too wet in the garden at present, and this is a pleasant diversion from what I should be doing inside :)

    I confirm I do not see a Fast Rewind either, function OK no LED pattern on both my Slice3 units. I wonder if the pattern file has the wrong name? Chewitt??

    After a power off reset on my main box, everything seems to work as it should (fast rewind excepted).

    chewitt: I notice that the power off sequence on the other Slice3 (main box) is a little different, it only does the sequence once quite fast and never gets to the end before the power drops. They have different HDDs in them, the main box (a full fat Slice, gunmetal) has a standard issue HDD (Toshiba, I think). The Slice Lite has a Western Digital HDD. Maybe this is the reason for the different pattern?

    Roger

    • Official Post

    I doubt there is any programmatic method to tell Kodi "wait until this python add-on command has finished" so as it shuts down slice.service is forcibly unloaded and that terminates playback of the shutdown LED pattern. The overall OS shutdown process does have a dependency on unmounting HDD(s) so if they respond differently in terms of time (which I think is likely) the pattern will play for a different time period. It might be possible to add a systemd service to the Slice image that runs a simple delay/countdown .. but figuring that out (as I'm no systemd expert) will be a super-super-low priority. If others want to poke around and figure it out, it would be welcome.

    The same file is used for normal rewind and faster rewind, but maybe something in the python? (as I don't do/read python):

    LibreELEC.tv/default.py at slice-8.2 · chewitt/LibreELEC.tv · GitHub

    Hi Chewitt,

    I am still having problems with the shutdown red/orange sequence, this is now on 8.1.2.

    Sometimes it doesn't happen at all, sometimes it starts very late, so only gets half way before shutdown actually occurs, so gets truncated, sometimes it almost works right. ;)

    It's not the end of the world, but would be nice to get working properly again.

    Regards,

    Kevin.

    Hi chewitt

    Just updated to 8.2.1 all seems fine thank you, one question.

    With your most recent builds, all, or most of the HEVC improvements have come over and HEVC is working well, except for updates which would allow 10bit formats to be decoded, any ideas?

    Thanks for your support,

    Kevin.