Posts by mattlach

Hi everyone,

Does anyone know a good place to read up on this? I fear I have allowed my knowledge on the topic to get out of date.

Way back I used to run Kodi under Linux desktops on custom HTPC builds. Then I switched to running Kodi straight from the project on custom low end Haswell era x86 celerons using minimal Linux installs based on Ubuntu Server without a Desktop back when x86 was really the only decent option.

After that I switched to OpenElec on that same hardware, and eventually transitioned to LibreElec. At that time, there really was no good solution for H265 and HDR under Linux for x86 (except for the integrated Intel video on a select few new small-core implementations, with poor support as that were so new, so I investigated and decided to go ARM.

For the last few years I have been running CoreElec on Hardkernel Odroid N2+ boards with Amlogic SoC's for my frontends. Other than the fact that I absolutely hate eMMC, I have liked the experience, and there is nothing wrong with the performance of the Odroid N2+ boxes even now a few years later, but with Hardkernel having released some really nice small boards based off of Intel's N97, (Odroid H4 series) I am wondering what I might be missing.

What is the state of compatibility for the latest formats (both hardware decode and output support) between popular ARM SOC's and x86 these days?

Am I missing out on anything by running these Amlogic boards?

For the best experience in mid 2024, which hardware would you choose?

Appreciate any information about the hardware and their comparative abilities as well as rationales for your selection where possible.

Is interface speed really a problem on Rpi4 though?

Quote from Nicolas

I prefer using power Off since years. LE Starts Up fast (faster than some receivers and stb's) and I never Had such Problems again.

I don't mind booting and shutting down the box every time. After all with modern SSD's boot time is so fast.

ONly problem is I don't think my remotes support powering on the system, which would annoy the significant other if she has to press the button on the box every time.

Hi all,

I am running the x86 version of the software on Intel systems using on board video.

One of the systems is connected to a 4k capable TV, but the CPU is not powerful enough to keep uo with 4K display modes in Kodi, so I run it at 1080p configured in the settings menus. Every few days or so the system decides it knows better and detects that it is connected to a 4K TV, changing the resolution slowing it down to a stutter. I then have to go back in and change the resolution back to 1080p for it to work again.

On my other system it occasionally (much less frequent) decides it knows better than me which Audio output to use, and changes it from HDMI0 where my Denon receiver is connected) to HDMI1 which nothing is connected. Again, it is an easy fix. I just go into the settings and switch it back to HDMI0, but it is really starting to get annoying.

Does anyone know why this is happening?

Is there some what I can write protect the settings files so they NEVERchange?

Much obliged,

Matt

Mine may be a separate problem, but my system occasionally gets confused and mixes the channels up. It usually happens after a pause or a sleep/resume cycle.

Suddenly center channel may be on rear right, and left front may be on center, with right front on rear right. Only way to fix it at that point is to reboot.

Hey all,

Over the last few weeks I have been trying to read up on the status of all the various builds for different hardware, and it has done nothing but make my head spin.

Is there a publicly available feature matrix anywhere that provides a snapshot of what is working (HEVC Hardware decode, audio passthrough to receiver, 10bit HDR, etc.) and on what hardware?

the Xorg Foundation did a very good job of this when they were working through the long arduous task of developing the Free Radeon drivers, and it was very helpful.

How does one get a good snapshot on current status of things?

Quote from Shoog

Exactly.

Ah,

Is the relationship between the two projects good and collaborative, or are there hurt feelings? Often when projects split there is some level of animosity. I don't know if I am walking into a minefield :p

Quote from Shoog

The N2+ works really well on Coreelec at the moment, runs quiet and is reliable. At some point in the future you can migrate to Mainline builds on the N2+ (not yet though). It offers the best price to performance ratio of any product at the moment. It runs quietly and handles just about any media you can throw at it. You could expect to pay 3-4x the price for anything x86 based that can do the same and it would cost you more in energy in the long run.
X86 make better media servers, but ARM rules in the field of media players at the moment, and Odroid rule that field by a large margin.
Libreelec follow Mainline development on ARM very closely - but its not mature enough to be a daily driver yet.

Shoog

So, what is CoreElec anyway? Just a fork of LibreElec focused on getting all the Amlogic features working?

Quote from chewitt

Kodi needs to know how to open ffmpeg calling the correct hardware decoder (nvdec, not vdpau) and for things like DRMPRIME to work it also needs to understand an entirely different buffer management process (EGL Streams) not GBM, the standard the Linux kernel adopted. None of them are a huge leap, but "no more proprietary crap" is one of the few things the members of Team Kodi agree upon so if it happens it will almost certainly be a surprise drive-by conttribution from someone new not an existting team member.

Appreciate the explanation! I knew I was oversimplifying things, but I didn't know how.

Hi all,

I don't know if this is hardware realted, software related, a common problem or if there are any suggestions on what to do about it.

On every Kodi box I've had, be it my own builds on top of Ubuntu minimal as suggested by Fritsch over at the Kodi forums years ago, OpenElec or now LibreElec I've always had difficulty with TV's detecting the HDMI signal from the boxes.

It seem hardware independent. It happened with AMD based systems, Nvidia based systems and with Intel based systems (though I have never tried an ARM based system, across probabyl 8 different x86 builds I've used over the years and four different TV's

Usually this happens up resume from sleep but sometimes on initial boot too.

I power on the TV, then power on the LE box. Sometimes (rarely) I get display output right away. Most of the time - however - it is a matter of pressing the power button on the LE box to put it back to sleep again and wake it again, or try turning the TV on and off again.. Sometimes this takes SEVERAL tries before it finally works, or I give up and hold down the power button on the box to force power it down and power it up again.

It's usually a running joke with my Fiance, her mother and I. Neither of them can usually get the things to display on several tries, so I get called, and try a couple of times powering things on and off again until I have display output.

When this happens, it never seems like the box is frozen. it responds to remote input to hibernate and wake up, is pingable and can be SSH:ed to. It just seems like the HDMI handshake process is having difficulties.

So I guess my question is, is this just life wit these systems, or is there something I have done wrong for several years now? Any suggestions?

Quote from Nicolas

All the staff also Users are great!

smp builds are great

sky42 builds are great

milhouse builds are great

CvH thank you for your tvh builds and support!

chewitt , Like you already said

HiassofT thx for your Support since years!

Da Flex , Klojum and many more thank you guys!

I am using LE and OE since v4 If I remember Well And since v5 I also donate every year to Help a Bit.

Also Friends of Mine are donating to keep this Project running. They don't even have a Forum Account cuz I so the support for them.

mattlach good Idea to Just say thank you!

Regards

Nicolas

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Thank you for adding the people I am not familiar with due to my less time here! I did not mean to exclude anyone!

So,

I've been a member of many forums for a disparate number of open source projects over the years, and I have to say I'm pretty impressed with the helpfulness and patience of forums staff and developers here, taking time to discuss and explain things and help people with their builds.

Since this is the forum for feedback, I wanted to send a big cheers to the forums staff and particularly to chewitt for patiently dealing with users questions in a way that frankly, most developers on most projects just wouldn't.

So, thank you all! It is appreciated!

Quote from chewitt

Linux network development - Patchwork

^ shows that that patches I flagged were accepted, meaning they are queued for Linux 5.9, and there are no new patches which means the chipset is still not supported in the kernel. Your next move is to wait patiently.

Any idea which kernel is targeted for the next stable release? (9.8?)

Or are you planning on including the patches and firmware yourself in next release?

I wonder if this will make it in there some time soon. Apart from the network chip used, this does seem like a great little board. I might just buy one to play around with

Quote from Klojum

Why not get a USB-SATA adapter and a SSD, to get proper disk speeds? SDcards and USB sticks can have okayish read speeds, but write speeds are usually crap. Plus, SSD drives have TRIM support, which most USB sticks do not have.

Or better yet, one of these:

Raspberry Pi: Add an M.2 2280 NVMe drive to the Raspberry Pi 4 for under US$25 - NotebookCheck.net News

Not sure what speed it gets on the Raspberry Pi, but the adapter has posted some pretty serious figures when used on PC hardware:

I bet that's about as good as it's going to get on a RP4.

Quote from daggs

actually, my arm based streamer does allow 1080p streaming but the video freezes instantly while the audio continues to play.

I thought of nuc because afaik it is powerful enough to use sw decoding.

as for netflix's middle finger, afaik, there is not much of alternative, disney+ and amazon doesn't support linux at all (last I heard), I cannot get cbs access, hulu doesn't seems worth it and I get netflix for free...

in another thread I've asked the same question, one of the users posted it works well for him.

All of these stupid streaming services use some form of DRM (not really their fault, the content owners require it as part of the licensing contracts)

I think the alternative is to use a static local media library rather than streaming. Buy blurays, (new films can be expensive, but plenty of good older content in bargain bins) rip to disk, enjoy. As an added bonus you'll get much better bitrates than with streaming content.

If streaming from the major branded streaming services is what you want to do, LibreElec/Kodi may not be the solution for you. I recommend a Roku. They are cheap and get the job done. :p Other than that, just about every TV you can buy these days comes with built in "smart" functionality.

I don't trust IOT on my network, but if you do, that's easy.

Quote from chewitt

Most NUC devices are technically capable of playing software decoded Netflix streams in 1080p (and in the past this was possible) but in the last year or so Netflix has implemented DRM changes that restrict Kodi (on Linux) to the SD versions of their content. Feel free to show Netflix DRM the middle-finger and use another service.

All of that said, wasn't Leia supposed to add support for DRM in apps? I vaguely remember some controversy around this. Some people hated it, others suggested it would be a way to shed the "piracy" image Kodi had due to many shady apps.

I would have thught this would have allowed for official apps from many of these companies, but maybe not.

Quote from menkalos

I never copied media to the drive. The drive did resize, but only to the max size supported by the "msdos" partition table type. I think it needs to format the drive using the "gpt" table type instead, so it can support larger partition types.

That sounds like it could be a problem limiting your partition size, but DOS partition tables support up to 2TB drives, so it doesn't explain why it would only be 33.6MB. Something else is going on here.

I'm sure you could partition a drive using GUID and manually copy the partitions into it, but then you'd likely need to reconfigure GRUB which would be a pain.

Quote from bubblegum57

I know this is not a solution to your question, but I don't really understand why you don't use a small usb for booting, & the 8TB usb separately for storage.

What happens, if you get it all up & running the way you asked, & you need to upgrade, do you have to start again repartitioning?

I second this. This is a much better approach. Much simpler, and long term resilient.

Or better yet, rather than local storage, use a NAS and mount network drives

Quote from AGLyons

So I'm sitting on about $350 of hardware I can't really do anything with.

Quote from CvH

better question, why does Hardkernel sells something that can't be used at release

They knew it before release that it don't work at the moment.

Sadly, as much as I love Linux, and as much as Linux is better today than it used to be, stuff like this is the norm.

Linux often doesn't get driver support for the latest hardware flowing downstream into distributions and projects that people use until well after the hardware is launched. There is a habit of referring to buying new hardware as "bleeding edge" when most enthusiasts just expect the latest launched hardware to work out of box.

It's a long history of most hardware companies - especially in the consumer world - focusing on launching with Windows driver support, and overlooking everything and anything else, with a few exceptions. Hardware targeted at enterprise tends to work better when new.

Either way, this device would have been much better if they had just skipped the silly 2.5gbit and 5gbit standards and gone with an established and reliable gigabit Intel NIC. Realtek is never anything but disappointing, even when you have driver support.

Quote from AGLyons

SO I tried the manual install on my first x86 system which I do have SSH access. I figured install the drivers on that one, image the system and restore it on the new H2+.

Manual installation

In a console window:

...$ cd ~/Downloads
...$ wget master.zip -O realtek-8125-dkms.zip
...$ unzip realtek-r8125-dkms-master.zip
...$ cd realtek-r8125-dkms-master/
...$ sudo ./autorun.shIf you do not want to use wget use whatever command your prefer (i.e git clone).

After executing these commands, you should have the NIC available for configuration using the Network Manager or equivalent.

If you want to know what the autorun.sh does before executing it, just open it in your favorite text editor (vim, pluma, etc.)

You can also find the REALTEK_README.txt into the folder providing additional information.

I guess you have to have the hardware in the system in order for it to install the drivers. Ended up with an error on line 30 of the autorun.sh script.

Anyone else able to help get this working for the meantime? I've looked into compiling my own but that's about 100 levels up from what I am able to do with linux at the moment. I couldn't figure out how to get the latest kernel. I ran a docker container from an Ubuntu image in the DHub repository. Turned out is was Kernel 3.x. I'm out of my depths here.

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How do you even get to console inside LibreElec? I've tried Ctrl-Alt-F1, F2, etc., but that didn't do anything.

Pull the drive and chroot into it from another machine?

Edit:

Never mind, I forgot you could enable sshd from within the GUI config screen.

Edit2:

Also, I was pulling a stupid. I forgot my Logitech K400 is one of those stupid devices requires me to hold on to get to the F keys.

CTRL-ALT-F1 did something but it blanked my screen. Could be I was in console but just couldn't tell because my TV doesn't support the display mode. Not sure.

Quote from Nicolas

Odroid H2+ was also on my list but at the Moment the NIC isn't supported in mainline Kernel. Should be there with Kernel 5.9.

Ugh. I wonder how far behind the latest mainline kernel the LibreElec project is?

I don't understand why they did this. It would have been a much better device with a Gigbit Intel NIC, than 2.5Gigabit Realtek junk.

I'll take the more reliable Intel NIC's any day of the week. I don't even know why the industry bothered with releasing 2.5 and 5Gigbit standards, when real 10Gig ethernet has been around for over a decade and should be able to make a cost effective jump to consumer. There is no need for anything in between.

Usually I just don't buy boards with Realtek NIC's because it doesn't matter which Realtek chip you have, they are all utter garbage.

If this little board had dual Intel NIC's it would open the doors for it to be used in so many more applications. It could even make for a great little pfSense box.

I understand Realtek is probably cheaper, but how much does it save? $2 per port? I'd happily pay that to get Intel NIC's.