Le Potato not playing certain h264 videos, only sound (and subtitles)

  • I've recently come over to LibreELEC from Xbian. I installed LibreELEC-AMGX.arm-11.0.1-lepotato on my Le Potato as I wanted a small media centre that could playback h265 which my RaspberryPi couldn't do with Xbian. "Spud" plays h265 files just fine generally, so very pleased. Thank you. :) But Spud doesn't seem to want to play back some h264 files: the only thing I can see that the non-playing h264 files have in common is that they seem to be 480 SD ones which show an aspect ratio of 2.00:1 (720 by 360) as opposed to say 1.78:1 or 2.20:1 (720 by 480). Other 480 SD h264 play fine. 576 SD h264 seems to play fine. 720 and 1080 HD h264 seem to play fine. Doesn't seem to matter if it's in an MP4 container or a Matroska container.

    MediaInfo output below of three 480 SD h264 video files. The first two files will playback audio and will display the subtitles, but no video, just a black screen. The third one plays both audio and video just fine. The first file is a new one so can't comment history wise, but the second file played fine on the RaspberryPi. Kodi video settings are the default with PRIME Render Method = Direct to Plane (it crashes if I set it to the other one!). Log file for Spud: http://ix.io/4uBV

    This file does not playback video, only sound and subtitles:

    This file does not playback video, only sound and subtitles:

    This file playbacks just fine and dandy:

  • Quote

    2023-04-30 16:23:11.551 T:843 error <general>: CVideoLayerBridgeDRMPRIME::Map - failed to add fb 0, ret = -22
    2023-04-30 16:23:11.556 T:843 debug <general>: CDRMUtils::DrmFbDestroyCallback - removing framebuffer: 44

    ^ those are shown while playing the first file, but I have no clue what the cause might be. I would suggest that you enable "adjust refresh" with 1080@60/59.94/50/24/23.976 modes whitelisted and "mode doubling" enabled, but I'm not sure that will alter the experience. You need to have DRMPRIME decoding enabled (it should be by default).

    You can also try updating to https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreE….arm-11.0.2.tar which uses a newer kernel and marginally different patches. Again, I have low expectations of anything changing .. but you never know /shrug