Raspberry Pi 4 libreelec not booting

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:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo rpi-eeprom-update
BCM2711 detected
Dedicated VL805 EEPROM detected
BOOTLOADER: up-to-date
CURRENT: Thu 03 Sep 2020 12:11:43 PM UTC (1599135103)
 LATEST: Thu 03 Sep 2020 12:11:43 PM UTC (1599135103)
 FW DIR: /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/critical
VL805: up-to-date
CURRENT: 000138a1
 LATEST: 000138a1

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ vcgencmd bootloader_version
Sep  3 2020 13:11:43
version c305221a6d7e532693cc7ff57fddfc8649def167 (release)
timestamp 1599135103
update-time 0
capabilities 0x00000000

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ vcgencmd bootloader_config
BOOT_UART=0
WAKE_ON_GPIO=1
POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=0

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!!

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

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?