Experience Sharing: Intel Arc A310 and LibreELEC vs. Custom Ubuntu Build

    Experience Sharing: Intel Arc A310 and LibreELEC vs. Custom Ubuntu Build

    I just wanted to share some experiences I’ve had using LibreELEC with the Intel Arc A310 card from Asus.

    While LibreELEC usually works great out of the box on many devices, certain hardware can occasionally cause significant headaches. I have specifically experienced some stubbornness with newer Intel-based hardware where the audio becomes very unstable when playing 4K content with TrueHD (7.1 Atmos) audio.

    I encountered constant audio dropouts that wouldn't resolve regardless of which settings I tweaked. The video playback remained smooth and fine, but the audio simply wouldn't stay stable. I reviewed the Kodi logs and messages, but found nothing useful, leading me to suspect that the Intel drivers for this newer hardware are still somewhat unrefined in the current LibreELEC builds.

    did try out all of the libreelec build from 12, and 13. none of them gave better resault when it came to sounddrop..

    The Workaround To test my theory about the drivers, I tried a different approach:

    1. I installed a minimal Ubuntu Server 24.04 setup.
    2. I installed the drivers directly from Intel following their official guide (https://dgpu-docs.intel.com/driver/client/overview.html).
    3. I built Kodi from source using GBM and GLES to ensure HDR switching worked correctly (as I understand there was a bug with GL that is fixed in Kodi 22).

    The Result With this setup, the audio became rock solid and completely free of dropouts.

    I plan to return to LibreELEC at a later date once the Linux images have matured and Intel support has improved. I still find LibreELEC to be the perfect tool for the job, as it eliminates the hassle of building from source and managing missing dependencies.

    The Intel drivers, firmware, kernel in LE are most likely newer than the Ubuntu ones if using the LE13 nightlies - you should confirm that you are using recent ones (202512 or 202601 images). Using a LE12 image on recent AMD or Intel hardware will miss out on all recent hardware additions.

    That being the case (if it is a current LE image that was tested) then there is likely to be some other difference in the platforms that is causing issue (a kernel option, a firmware module, a compile difference, a required software component.) The xe driver works well but I only test it with the iGPU.

    the kernel i did test it on in LE was 20260105, and 20260106 those are newer then the one you mentions? should not that also fix the drop out on sound?

    I actually did a fresh install with 260105, and upgraded to 260106, but no change,, so maybe you are right there is some tweaking that must be done for Arc 310 on LE

    The problem description reminds me of the issue with N100/N150 boxes where running the display at 12-bit depth (driver default) results in audio dropouts, but capping it at 10-bit results in lower HDMI bandwidth consumption which leaves sufficient bandwidth for audio to also fit. See this script: https://github.com/LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv/pull/8588/files which remains un-merged because it's a rather ugly hack and a proper code fix needs to be found. See if that improves things?

    There is not enough information in the above report to understand or investigate the issue. Good that you were testing with the current release of LE. The Intel drivers (and graphics and audio and kernel) are the current releases, so would suggest that you will need to compare what versions and what compilation differences are between the Ubuntu and LE release. The Ubuntu 24.04 image will likely have down rev packages. Kernel, Firmware GuC and HuC, XE driver are all likely to play a part if the other packages are the same versions. I’m assuming that you are compiling the same Kodi version on Ubuntu with the same settings as LE and running without a window manager.

    yes, im running in GBM, and kodi version 21.3, i guess the intel driver directly from intel is the differ.

    but this will just be guesses from my part, im unfortantly not that good when it comes to whats happening under the hood. But im possitive that this is something that will one day be solved.

    the intel driver on ubuntu at the moment..

    Driver Version 25.48.36300.8

    Device Version OpenCL 3.0 NEO

    Device OpenCL C Version OpenCL C 1.2
    ICD loader Version 2.3.2
    ICD loader Profile OpenCL 3.0

    not sure this is any good info.

    (I think ill stay away from ugly hacks chewitt)

    Edited 4 times, last by plingplong (January 11, 2026 at 8:39 AM).

    If you guys want me to help out on this issues, I have the possibility to switch quickly betweene ubuntu and LE, just give me what conf file and how much debug log i need to activate in kodi..

    It would be academically interesting to see the simple (but ugly) workaround in that script used on the LE install to confirm it's the same problem. If it is, the issue is deep in driver code and no amount of configurable logging will show anything useful. It would need the driver modifying to add custom debugging to figure out, and that's something for Intel engineers to do. Unfortunately they don't seem to have grasped the issue yet (admittely we didn't poke them for a while) so it remains unresolved.