SVT Play livestream spontaneously quits after 1 second if played on LibreElec

    Describe the bug

    Using kodi-svtplay addon on LibreElec, when streaming live TV, the videostream plays for approx. 1 second before spontaneously quitting.

    How to reproduce

    Steps to reproduce the behavior:

    1. Install the SVT Play addon (Addons - Install from repo - Kodi Addon Repo - Video addons - SVT Play)
    2. Open the addon.
    3. Go to Channels and pick any channel.
    4. The video stream will play for only one second before quitting.

    Information

    This is only reproducible on LibreElec Kodi. Using Kodi 21.3 on Ubuntu does not spontaneously quit.

    Let me know if SVT Play is IP geolocked to Sweden.

    Log file available in the github issue thread linked above.

    This could be the cause of the issue:

    Code
    2025-11-01 10:48:10.479 T:1208     info <general>: CDVDVideoCodecDRMPRIME::Open - using decoder V4L2 mem2mem H.264 decoder wrapper
2025-11-01 10:48:10.479 T:1208    error <general>: ffmpeg[0x212e50a0]: [h264_v4l2m2m] Could not find a valid device
2025-11-01 10:48:10.479 T:1208    error <general>: ffmpeg[0x212e50a0]: [h264_v4l2m2m] can't configure decoder
...
2025-11-01 10:48:10.540 T:1214    error <general>: ffmpeg[0x209fd8f0]: [deinterlace_v4l2m2m] Could not find a valid device
2025-11-01 10:48:10.540 T:1214    error <general>: ffmpeg[0x209fd8f0]: [Parsed_deinterlace_v4l2m2m_0] Failed to configure output pad on Parsed_deinterlace_v4l2m2m_0
2025-11-01 10:48:10.540 T:1214    error <general>: CDVDVideoCodecDRMPRIME::FilterOpen - avfilter_graph_config:  Invalid argument (-22)

    I'm not an expert in reading streaming service logs (and different services will behave differently) but it looks like audio and video are separate streams, and everything goes through a normal looking process of obtaining stream manifestsa and then selecting audio and video streams. The audio stream looks to be selected, but then the video stream switches from SD (448x252@50) to HD (1080p@50) and then the stream stalls.

    There are quite a lot of streaming add-ons installed so I would be interested to see logs from a current LE13 nightly that has only the SVT play and inputstream.adaptive add-ons installed. I'm not expecting anything to be different, but it will remove some noise from the log. I don't see any 'errors' that would e.g. indicate Python issues or something that traces back to the underlying OS. IMHO if there's a difference between the add-on under LE and the add-on the author tested on Ubuntu it's more likely to be add-on or i.a configuration and not the OS environment.

    NB: The stream is H264 and RPi5 does not have H264 hardware decode or hardware deinterlacing so the v4l2_m2m errors in the log that Da Flex has seized upon are nothing more than ffmpeg correctly failing to find hardware decode and deinterlace /dev/video nodes that don't exist and failing back to use software capabilities. All normal and expected on an RPi5 device.

    Thanks, I'll try a separate SD card loaded with LE13 nightly and only SVT Play and inputstream.adaptive addons installed. I'm at work so it will have to wait for about 10 hours though. I will report back if the behavior changed, and provide a cleaner log file.

    Question: I think I have inputstream libraries installed from both slyguy and kodi. Can that cause conflicts? Or am I overthinking it...

    Recently HiassofT added libx264 to the external ffmpeg I wonder if the same thing has to be done within Kodi or if that is even possible with DRM Prime

    It's not transcoding though since the source is already h264 so I wonder if it something else. nosen if you enabled subtitles in the plugin does turning them off help?

    The ffmpeg version used with Kodi supports software decoded H264 on RPi5 without issues and transcoding is not relevant to the problem. Our usersbase is ~80% RPi boards and if there were fundamental issues with H264 we'd have a thousand forum posts on the topic.

    Quote from nosen

    Question: I think I have inputstream libraries installed from both slyguy and kodi. Can that cause conflicts? Or am I overthinking it...

    There is no inputstream addon involved and therefore no helper required. The HLS stream is directly played by kodi.

    Hint: after disabling the geo-blocked content in SVT addon settings everyone is able to test. Works on my personal LE12.2 Generic development image.

    Quote from mglae

    Hint: after disabling the geo-blocked content in SVT addon settings everyone is able to test. Works on my personal LE12.2 Generic development image.

    Good hint, the non-geoblocked content works fine here on LE12.2.1 / RPi5 as well.

    so long,

    Hias