LibreELEC 10.0.0 - RPi 4 8GB - unable to play mxf file

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    I'm unable to play 4K .mxf file(711MB, 39secs) form a Panasonic 4K camera on RPi 4 8GB, rev 1.4, running LibreELEC 10.0.0. I have tried the same with Raspberry PI OS, VLC just displays blocks of colour/scrambled video.

    On Matrix, this file is not even visible on Video Player or File Manager , but other files like .zip are !!!.

    Can RPi 4 handle this format ?. Do i have any options to play these types of files on Pi ?.

    Thanks,


    Codec Info:

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    • Official Post

    The 4K/h264 combination is not a very common one. Your Panasonic camera may be a bit older and not have support yet for the newer h265/hevc codec.

    The .mxf file seems like another container file, such as mkv. The mxf extension may not be recognized as such, but you can add video extensions in Kodi's advancedsettings.xml file.

    The RPi4 does not have hardware acceleration built-in, so depending on bitrates and all, your video may not be displayed properly as the RPi's CPU is not as powerful as its GPU. Converting the video to h265/hevc format, the RPi4 should have no problem decoding/displaying that.

    Zip files are supported for various reasons, such as comic books.

    Quote from Klojum
    .....

    but you can add video extensions in Kodi's advancedsettings.xml file.

    The RPi4 does not have hardware acceleration built-in, .......

    Thanks, after adding mxf file in settings file, it is getting listed, still unable to play.

    Somewhere i read omxplayer can be compiled with hardware acceleration for RPi4, can such players be installed on LibreELEC(build on debian, copy the executable to Matrix) ?. Or anyone already done pre-built binary for RPi4 ?.

    Thanks,

    • Best Answer
    • Official Post

    Even if you solve .mxf format detection in Kodi, an RPi4 cannot hardware decode 4K H264 media (the H264 IP block is the same as an RPi3Bs and it supports only up to 1080p) and it will not have the CPU grunt to handle software decoding gracefully. Your best option is to use an app like Handbrake to re-encode the files to 4K HEVC (8-bit) which is supported. If you can change the camera to use HEVC instead of H264 you can skip this step in the future. NB: OMXplayer exists in LE 9.2 images as an alternative to MMAL decoding for older RPi devies. OMXplayer support was removed from Kodi 19 so it is not present in LE10 images. It is not the solution, because no RPi device supports 4K H264 hardware decode.

    Quote from chewitt

    RPi4 cannot hardware decode 4K H264 media......

    ...... If you can change the camera to use HEVC instead of H264

    Many thanks. If it were possible we could play 4K files directly from RPi to BlackMagic production switcher - without software encoding.

    Will check if the camera can save as HEVC or any other format.