Libre Elec freezes with all builds so far on le Potato

  • Wouldn't it be nice if *something* worked. The nightly build will not even seek without locking up, and LibreELEC-LePotato.arm-9.0.2 locks up partway through the movie, but it *does* seek. I thought this might be a nice board to run 4k video on, but apparently not. Back to my slowly dying I5 Intel.

    Here's the dump from the serial port on the 9.0.2:

  • Two suggestions:

    a) Drop the kernel.img and SYSTEM files from dtech images into /storage/.update/ and reboot to udpate to 9.2.8 which might behave better than Ye Olde 9.0.2 image now.

    b) Have a play with https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreE…lepotato.img.gz which is using K20rc1 and modern uboot and Linux. Hardware decoding isn't perfect and there are some features on the long-term to-do list still, but as long as your media requirements aren't too challenging it's quite usable.

  • I mostly play 4K, H265 encoded movies which IMO is pretty challenging. I have an I5 that can barely keep up, and sometimes does not.

    However, I did pull down CoreELEC-Amlogic-ng.arm-20.0-Nexus_rc1-LePotato.img, and to my shock, it booted and managed to finish the 4k movie that locked up with Libreelec. I will stick with this for the time being. I had high hopes of finding a working kernel then running Alpine Linux on it, and while I did succeed in the latter, the former has video issues. I may just pull the CoreELEC boot/kernel out and use that with Alpine, but I'm guessing there are patches for the players too.

    Thanks for the response and if I run into issues with core, I will use your advise.

  • Hardware decoding on a modern kernel codebase requires patched kernel + patched ffmpeg. LE sources are currently as good as it gets:

    Commits · chewitt/linux
    Linux kernel source tree -- WARNING I REBASE MY BRANCHES! - Commits · chewitt/linux
    github.com
    Commits · jc-kynesim/rpi-ffmpeg
    FFmpeg work for RPI. Contribute to jc-kynesim/rpi-ffmpeg development by creating an account on GitHub.
    github.com

    The manjaro folks are tracking patches fairly well to result in a useable 'current' distro. Performance and feature completeness on the vendor kernel (used by CE) is better, but compatibility between old vendor kernels and the rest of a modern distro codebase can be a challenge.

    The main negative I've seen in the LE/AMLGX image with LePotato is 100-BaseT Ethernet (common to all S905X boards). If trying to play large ISO rips Kodi often warns about slow sources etc. - S912 devices are normally better since most have Gigabit NICs.

    NB: CE is run as a separate project so report any issue to their forums, we don't track their images at all.