[imx6] only ZDF Mediathek movies cause Kodi crash

1st Official Post

    First of all, thanks a lot for the hard and dedicated work. Libreelec and Kodi are really great. I'm running Libreelec 8.0.1 on a cubox-i4pro (imx6) and have an issues where I hope for your recommendations:

    I'm heavily using the different German Mediathek addons. While most, e.g, ARD, Arte ... are working just fine, I do have trouble with playing ZDF movies for quite a while. The issue seems not to be related to the add-on since I did not find other posts on it and since it persists over different add-ons (ZDF Mediathek, ZDF Mediathek 2016, Mediathek).

    What happens is: upon starting a movie, the wheel starts spinning, next the play icon appears next to the clock, and then Kodi just restarts (not a full reboot, just Kodi). I checked crash logs and they always show "NOTICE: Let's decode with iMX VPU" as last entry.

    Several months back, I was able to watch ZDF movies like any other movies, but maybe since they relaunched their Mediathek this issue persists. Could this be somehow related to the video format?

    I would be super happy for any recommendation on how to solve that issue.

    Thank you!

    • Official Post
    Quote from FranzMarck


    The issue seems not to be related to the add-on since I did not find other posts on it

    So because you didn't find related posts, the add-on is not to blame? :)
    Let's not jump to conclusions so quickly.


    Quote from FranzMarck


    What happens is...

    We also prefer to have a full 'debug enabled' kodi.log file, so we can see what goes on internally in your Cubox. Other logs are welcome too, since we cannot read your log files from where we sit.

    Thanks for your quick replies! I will create a log file and upload here, probably on Monday.

    Klojum: the sentence was not well formulated, what I meant is that 3 different add-ons developed by different developers show the same issue on the same stream. It must not, but it looks like the reason could be something specific to the stream.

    Hi,

    It would be great if you could take a quick look at my issue. I suspect that a certain video encoding and/or meta-data are responsible for the Kodi crash. If I knew the reason, I might be able to retrieve the video in a different format ...

    thanks and
    best wishes

    Quote from FranzMarck


    Hi,

    It would be great if you could take a quick look at my issue. I suspect that a certain video encoding and/or meta-data are responsible for the Kodi crash. If I knew the reason, I might be able to retrieve the video in a different format ...

    thanks and
    best wishes

    Dear FranzMarck,

    I had same issue with my Cubox i4-pro and LibreElec Krypton, no matter what kernel (3.14 or 4.4) I use.
    You can try to:
    1.) Use an alternative addon like "Mediathek direkt" from kodinerds.net or ...
    2.) I found that if i set the video quality in the Mediatek addon to HD - Kodi crashed. Setting it to high or very high worked for me.

    Good luck and regards

    Dear bartimausi,

    :) That was exactly the hint I was looking for. The other add-ons (ZDF Mediathek, ZDF Mediathek 2016, Unithek) don't have an option to set the desired quality anymore. However, I was lucky with "Mediathek" and the new add-on that you suggested (Mediathek direkt). They work like a charm in "high quality", but crash Kodi in "HD quality".

    --> I wonder if we should file a bug on this? If yes, is this something for LibreElec or for Kodi directly?

    One more thing:
    How do you use these add-ons? Do you find your shows, movies ... the traditional way (tv program...)? What I really like about the ones that don't work anymore is that they offer a recommender (most viewed -- Meistgesehen) that shows you what others are watching. The two add-ons that remain don't offer this. Contrary, they offer access to all the stations in parallel and a unified textual search, which makes it super hard to discover something interesting for me. -- Do you have some "guide" that helps you in finding what you like to watch. (For quite a while I'm hoping that Kodi will make these libraries/repositories (Mediathek) first class citizens like the old sequential TV.)

    Thank you so much and
    best wishes