Posts by hedgehog90

I've been using the 'LibreELEC-S905.arm-8.2.4.2-Test2-wetekdvb.img' build of Kodi on an X96 Mini (S905-W CPU, Mali-450 GPU, 2GB RAM) for about 6 months now.

However as I'm increasingly watching lossless bluray remuxes, I've been noticing more and more hiccups recently.

There's one particular glitch that I'll notice 2 or 3 times during the course of a film, whereby the bottom half of the video suddenly scrambles and becomes very pixelly and glitchy for a second, before reverting to normal.

Last night however, I was experiencing this glitch about once every 30 seconds with a max video bitrate of ~35mbps, making the film almost unwatchable:

There was also a period where the color greyed and horizontal red and green horizontal bands appeared, which got worse and worse over time.
Stopping the video (or seeking to a different time in the video) and then resuming fixed this. This appears to be a separate issue as I'd never experienced this before, unlike the glitchy pixellated bottom described above:

Video Link (There's also an appearance of the first glitch in within the first 2 seconds)

Here's a screenshot from the video, look at the red box on the left or the white strip of wood running down the wall in the centre, you will see red and green bands. I should have taken a picture a few minutes after this, where the red and green bands were much more pronounced, and the video was looking noticeably de-saturated:

At one point the film froze completely and the audio just looped half a second of audio until I rebooted. Again, never experienced this before either.

It was also a bit jerky in the playback, not a consistent framerate, but the player debug info suggested there were no such issues.

aq was consistently 98-99%, vq consistently 85-89%

It eventually seemed to correct itself and the latter half of the film played relatively OK.

The video in question was being played from a USB stick, which can easily be read at speeds above 35mbps.

The video was not a re-encoding, but a remux of the original bluray disc, 23.976 fps, 1080p AVC video, DTS S16 5.1 audio, in an MKV container.

I could provide the entire mediainfo for the video, but nothing strikes me as being different from other videos that have played almost flawlessly on the device, except a marginally higher bitrate than usual.

Has anyone else encountered a similar problem? Is there any way to overcome it?

Is there a more up-to-date/better version of LibreELEC/Kodi that I can install for my device?

I posted in this thread a couple months ago about a bug whereby one or more audio channels on a 6/8 channel audio stream drop out in the middle of watching something.

I've experienced this 4 times since and it's quite annoying.

Is there any temp fix or hack to fix this? I have to resort to rebooting most times.

Quote from chewitt

It's an infrequent and half-understood issue with the half-fixed audio subsystem in ye olde 3.14 kernel. It will not be fixed, because nobody with the competencies to perform major kernel development is prepared to work on that fugly codebase now. The 'fix' will come when we flush that turd kernel and move up to mainline, which is something being actively worked on.

Until the fix, any idea how to fix it if it happens again? I'm not actually sure what it was I did the other day, it would be useful to know.

Quote from chewitt

It's an infrequent and half-understood issue with the half-fixed audio subsystem in ye olde 3.14 kernel. It will not be fixed, because nobody with the competencies to perform major kernel development is prepared to work on that fugly codebase now. The 'fix' will come when we flush that turd kernel and move up to mainline, which is something being actively worked on.

I know this is a difficult/impossible question to answer as a part-time developer myself, but do you have any ETA on when this new kernel will be released?

I had a really strange problem the other night when I was watching a film on my X96 mini 2GB.

I should note this is a different version of Libre to the one in the OP which I couldn't get to install, called 'LibreELEC-S905.arm-8.2.4.2-Test2-wetekdvb.img.gz' from here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1p6wmq6o9ts08yow3dnmax6tytsp445pb

About 20 minutes into the film, all of the speech suddenly cut out. It was the weirdest thing, I could hear all the ADR and sound effects and music perfectly, the character's lips moved but I couldn't hear them.

The film in question was David Lynch's Lost Highway, so I assumed it was intentional at first, as it occurred moments after a shock and seemed to make sense in a Lynch-y way, until I reached a moment which I knew had audible dialogue and it still wasn't back.

The film was encoded with 5.1 surround in HEVC, here's the mediainfo:

Anyway long story short, it somehow fixed itself while I had it paused for a few minutes trying to work out what the problem was, maybe after I rolled it back 30 seconds the vocals returned, the previous 10 minutes played fine and I watched the rest of the film without a problem.

Is this a known issue? Any ideas what could have happened and is it fixiable?

Lost Highway btw if you haven't seen it is pretty special. I'd seen it years ago when I was young, but it made no sense at the time and I'd forgotten most of it since.

Rewatching it was a massive treat. I think my technical issue added to the experience in a strange way.

Really mysterious, head-f**k of a film. Loved it.

I finally have it running!

Thanks White, the other build did the trick, along with the 905X gxl_p212_1g.dtb device tree.

It's really smooth most of the time, but sometimes it bottlenecks and freezes for about 10 seconds, I think that might be the crumby SD Card I'm using.

Oh, and the gpu and cpu temperatures are pretty worrying (and I've not enabled the GPU overclock option in the AMLogic menu)

After 30 minutes or so they're both hovering between 160-170 farenheit, and the box is hot to the touch, last I checked though the temperatures wouldn't even display, just '??'.

Quote from White

If I was you, I will first contact the seller and asking for refund...

Already have, seller hasn't responded. If I do manage to send it back for a full refund I've got the original firmware.

Quote from bumerc

Please post original dtb file and if possible bootloader log and PCB photo.

I don't know how to get to the bootloader log / original dtb and I don't want to take it apart to get to the PCB for reasons mentioned above.

Quote from White

About the booting to LE, which LE image you have tried? On my box, I tried with LE 8.2.3.1 from kszaq post but it doesn't work. Then I use the image from wrxtasy and balbes150 , LE booted as supposed. So you should play around with different image to see which will work.

This one?

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1p6wmq6o9ts08yow3dnmax6tytsp445pb

I have a X96 Mini S905-W.

I bought it thinking it was a 2GB RAM/16GB ROM model, it was sold as a 2G/16G and it even says so on the sticker between its feet, but upon booting the original firmware I discovered it was a 1GB/8GB model (unless for some strange reason it's decidedly not using half of its resources)

I've burnt the LibreELEC img onto several sd cards and replaced the device tree file with every S905-W and S905-X (1gb and 2gb just in case) dtb file.

I'm doing everything right, renaming it to dtb.img and overwriting the one on the SD card, using a toothpick to hold down the reset button when plugging in the power, and holding it down until an image appears... but an image never appears.

Nothing works, I get no response, all I get is a black screen and no output signal.

As soon as I remove the sdcard and reboot, it loads the original firmware.

I've tried putting some other compatible firmware installations (ATVXperience ROM) on the sdcard and it installs correctly, this however refuses to work.

I've also tried burning the rom directly onto the internal using the USB_Burning_Tool, which worked for other roms, but I get an error and nothing gets written.

I've noticed the file structure of the sd card when burning a rom is completely different to what I see when I burn LibreELEC on there.

I doubt that'll help diagnose the problem but I thought I might as well mention it.