Raspberry Pi 4 libreelec not booting

1st Official Post

    Hi all,

    I use libreelec on my Raspberry Pi 4 and it seems that as of today I cannot boot on it.

    First I've thought there was something wrong with my TV and its HDMI port, but when tested with my laptop it was all good.

    I formatted the SD card and tested Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu - both worked fine.

    So I went back trying a fresh install of libreelec 9.2.6 with Raspberry Pi Imager.

    I tried both the libreelec distro option in the installer and the personalized image using the file downloaded from the official libreelec website. When I fire up the Raspberry, I only get the multicolored square, then a few seconds of a black screen, the multicolored square again, and then nothing more.

    Has anyone got an idea of what is going on?

    Could you please help me?

    Thank you very much !!

    Oh and by the way: I wish you all the best for 2021 :)

    Thanks for your response!

    So I've made an SD card with Raspberry Pi OS on it to check the bootloader and from what I understand, it seems that I am up-to-date with the vl805-000138a1 version:

    Do you see something wrong?

    I am not a fan of nightly build but I will test it.

    Could you please point me in the direction of a post explaining how to set-up a bootable LE USB key for the RPi4?

    Thanks for the help!!

    No, I don't see any obvious issue.

    The VL805 firmware release 000138a1 is the latest available.

    Your bootloader dated 2020-09-03 is currently default/critical so it's also not bad but I would go to latest available and yet stable version 2020-12-11

    You may see details here:

    rpi-eeprom/release-notes.md at master · raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom · GitHub

    The bootloader config looks also default, I am using a more complex/customized, like this:

    [all]

    BOOT_UART=0

    WAKE_ON_GPIO=0

    POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=1

    DHCP_TIMEOUT=45000

    DHCP_REQ_TIMEOUT=4000

    TFTP_FILE_TIMEOUT=30000

    ENABLE_SELF_UPDATE=1

    DISABLE_HDMI=0

    BOOT_ORDER=0xf41

    USB_MSD_PWR_OFF_TIME=3000

    USB_MD_LUN_TIMEOUT=5000

    A detailed config params description:

    Raspberry Pi 4 bootloader configuration - Raspberry Pi Documentation

    Even with your current bootloader release, you should be able to directly boot LE 9.2.6 or LE 9.80 nightly from USB flash / disk, AFAIK all you need to do is to image it like it was your SD card (and maybe to add the preferred BOOT_ORDER parameter to bootloader config), connect to USB port, remove the microSD card and boot.

    Then it was necessary to put this line to /flash/config.txt in LE:

    dtparam=sd_poll_once=on

    otherwise there was a repeating error message filling log due to missing SD card (not sure if it's still necessary).

    Edited 2 times, last by ghtester (January 3, 2021 at 11:25 AM).

    Alright so I booted on the last RaspOS lite distro to do a firmware update:

    Code
    sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo rpi-update

    It took a very long time (IMO) but it managed to go through it.

    Then I've made an USB key with LE 9.8 nightly as suggested, and it booted!

    But I didn't want to have an USB key plugged in nor being on a nightly build, so I tried again using my SD Card and the official release (LE 9.2.6) and it also works!

    I still didn't know what exactly happened and why it wouldn't work before but hey - now it's time to reconfigure my media center!

    Thanks for your help ghtester :) I appreciate it !!

    One last thing though: despite having added “hdmi_enable_4kp60=1“ to my config.txt, I am still limited to 30 fps in 4k resolution. I had the problem before and I still don't know how to fix this. Maybe I should create another thread?

    • Official Post
    Quote from nikhow

    One last thing though: despite having added “hdmi_enable_4kp60=1“ to my config.txt, I am still limited to 30 fps in 4k resolution. I had the problem before and I still don't know how to fix this. Maybe I should create another thread?

    Yes, but use our forum search first. We already had that 4kp60 topic several times.