Posts by jbinkley60

I wanted to take a minute and provide some updates here on Hyper-V and virtualized Libreelec instances. From my testing I was able to get a Windows Hyper-V guest working with Vmworkstation running in the guest machine (i.e. basically nested hypervisors) with Libreelec virtual machines running under VMworkstation. I wasn't expecting great performance but just looking for functionality. In the end I could not get the Libreelec OVAs to run due to a lack of graphics card pass-through from the host through the Hyper-V hypervisor. Supposedly Hyper-V can do this via GPU partitioning but I ran out of energy to figure this out and the overall complexity of maintaining nested hypervisors wasn't exciting me.

So I went down another route of running Hyper-V along side of VMworkstation on the same host. It's a much simpler approach and with Hyper-V being a Type 1 hypervisor and VMworkstation being a Type 2, it should work. At first it wouldn't work until I found out that I needed to enable a Windows feature called "virtual machine hosting." This adds hypervisor extensions to support Type 1 and Type 2 running together. Once I enabled this feature Vmworkstation fired right up next to Hyper-V and the Libreelec OVAs came right up with full graphics and everything.

So now I have the Hyper-V machines running as my main machines (after converting over my old VMware VMs to Hyper-V VMs) and I am running Vmworkstation just to handle the Libreelec testing VMs. I am surprised so far with performance and stability of them both running at the same time. The Libreelec OVAs are a little slower than when Hyper-V wasn't enabled on the host machine but the performance is reasonable, especially for development testing.

Thanks,

Jeff

Quote from chewitt

I can't recall the last time anyone on staff talked about using the Virtual image for development purposes, so I'm highly confident there have been zero thoughts about Hyper-V support. If people did want to run an image on something non-vmware the go-to these days would probably be Oracle Virtualbox since it's $free, already works, and doesn't require Windows. On the server side Proxmox seems to be what people are using.

Well I understand your perspective and I have some friends running Proxmox servers as they moved away from ESX and similar. I've got large machines running Windows with over 1PB of RAID and other hardware which runs great on Windows 11 Pro as hosts. Converting everything to Proxmox would be quite an undertaking. A move from VMworkstation to Hyper-V makes sense for me and is actually less costly since no more VMware licenses and I already own Windows Pro with Hype-V support. I think there is more Hyper-V out there than most folks realize, including most Fortune 100 companies run it extensively. I've worked for a few of them.

Anyway, if you change your mind, I'd be happy to test. I don't think it would be a heavy lift to add the libraries for Hyper-V but that's easy for me to say, since I wouldn't be doing it. The fact that Ubuntu and Slackware support it already (I presume Debian does too, I've just never tested yet) lead me to believe that it isn't a major uplift.

I may try keeping one VMworkstation machine running and be able to switch back and forth for testing. I'll give a shot at nested virtualization and load VMworkstation on a Windows 10 Guest VM under Hyper-V. Supposedly nested virtualization will work but I suspect I'll run into video driver issues for Kodi at that point. We'll see.

Thanks,

Jeff

I realize this thread is a bit old but was wondering whether any more thought has been given to add support for Hyper-V virtual environments given the purchase of VMware by Broadcom and their apparent reduced interest in supporting the end user community ?

I am doing a lot of testing right now to move all of my VMs away from VMworkstation to Hyper-V. Of course I always have the option of running Kodi under a Windows guest VM but would prefer to get to a native LibreElec solution. I was able to get Ubuntu and Slackware Linux running under Hyper-V so driver and kernel support is available.

Thanks,

Jeff

Quote from libreAU

Another update:


Did NOT work on intel nuc11paki5 & intel nuc11pahi5 with iris xe. Bummer!

The only thing close I've got is no adapter or the cable matterones. I've yet to try direct display port. But I'm not confident.

Got a big box of amazon returns today. fuuuuu..

.......

FYI if you are determined to run linux and kodi/variant and use HD audio and intel I think I read that 13th Gen NUCs work without issue if you're prepared to sell/launch your existing batch and splash out yet again. They're only about $1kaud each.

</complain>

Comments are my own and could/probably be wrong. Feel free to correct them.

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Or you can spend 1/3rd of that on an AMD mini-PC and be done with the issue. I went the Beelink route but there are others. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to go the Intel route. I have 4 NUCs. I now use them for other things.

Thanks,

Jeff

Quote from Sanity

I’m having the same issue with audio dropouts on my Intel NUC 12 Pro.
When I used it with Windows 10, the audio worked perfectly, although I sometimes experienced minor video dropouts when starting or stopping a movie.
I’m running the latest official LibreELEC version, and my receiver is a Pioneer SC-LX801.
I tried the 10-bit fix mentioned here, and it seems to have solved the problem for now.
The question is whether it's poor Intel hardware or bad drivers?
It worked without audio dropouts on Windows, but since our family has completely switched from Windows to Linux some time ago, we’re not interested in changing operating systems again.

It's an Intel driver issue. I switched from Intel NUCs to AMD min-PCs and my problems went away. Happily running LibreElec on AMD. I waited a few years to see if the problem went away. You can also not use passthrough audio and the problem should disappear on your NUC.

Thanks,

Jeff

So I have an update here. I upgraded the hardware for this Windows machine running VMWorkstation 17.5 . The new motherboard and CPU support AMD ATI Radeon via a Ryzen 7 9800 X3D. I loaded the latest ATI drivers and had to enable 3D video for each LibreElec OVA but now all of them are working from back as far as 9.2.6 to current. It looks like my older ATI Radeon card didn't have new enough DX support for VMware.

Jeff

Quote from w46n3r

Oh well. Intel could at least point us which AVR it used for testing (if any). At the very least it would serve as a starting point for us to begin bothering Denon/Marantz about it.

I went to an AMD box from an Intel box and problem solved. It wasn't my preferred approach but I got tired of waiting. The Intel boxes I have (NUC 8i7BEH and N100) both work fine with my Yamaha AVR as long as I don't use passthrough audio.

Jeff

Quote from legoman666

Any ideas?

Here's the thread regarding the N100 issues with certain AVRs. I ended up going with an AMD SER6 box and couldn't be happier.

Thanks,

Jeff

Quote from legoman666

I get the same thing with a beelink n100 and a Marantz receiver. Works fine with a DP to hdmi adapter, but not with straight hdmi. Tried different cables and various settings.

Unfortunately my N100 doesn't have a display port where I can test this. It just has 2 HDMI ports.

Thanks,

Jeff

Quote from thereddestdog

Long story short: There is some sort of hardware audio bug with NUC11 devices and LibreELEC, which causes the audio driver to break until I reboot the machine. Very frustrated with it, and not able to solve it (check my post history..)

Currently using the Intel NUC11PAHi3, and I want to get a new NUC or similar with which I can simply move the SATA SSD and not have to set up everything again like a fresh install. Potentially like the ASUS RNUC13ANKI30000UI for instance

Is LibreELEC picky about booting on similar x86 hardware? Anything I need to know?

Good luck on whether the ASUS NUC will resolve your audio dropout issue. See my response on this thread. I've given up on the Intel platform for now and bought a Beelink with AMD. So far it's been rock solid and no dropouts.

Thanks,

Jeff

Quote from racemaniac

I also use a Denon receiver and have the issue.

I did find an interesting thread on the Kodi forum where they found the same (or at least very similar) issue, and think it's an issue with the audio clocks in that mode causing issues:
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=372242&page=3

They made this ticket for intel: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/i915/kernel/-/issues/8276

Sounds very close to what we're experiencing.

And after reading their thread, if taking the Denon receiver out of the equation solves the ticket, we should also test a non intel source on the denon to see if the issue persists. Because if other devices can perfectly play 4k hdr 24p through the Denon receiver, and only with intel we get the audio dropouts, it's some incompatibility between intel & Denon that coulds still have the root cause at either side.

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I've been watching this thread for a long time and have had an Intel NUC (8i7BEK) and a newer N100 working with a Yamaha RX-A3080 AVR. Both Intel platforms have the same audio dropout issues with Dolby Atmos and other bitstream audio sources. I've been living with this issue on Intel for a few years.

I recently switched to a Beelink SER6 platform with an AMD processor and GPU. So far no dropouts with my Yamaha AVR. I realize it's way overkill but it's also lightning fast and no more dropouts. Prior to the Beelink SER6 I had tried a Raspberry Pi 5 for a few months with my AVR and no dropouts either. All running prior and the latest versions of LibreELEC.

I even tried OSMC and the Vero 4K+ and Vero V with no dropouts. Only LibreELEC with the Intel platforms have dropouts in my setup. I've not tried running Windows / Kodi on any of the Intel; mini-PCs.

Thanks,

Jeff

.

Thank you so much for LibrELEC 12.0.1 which has Kodi 12.1 and has the fix for the stereo upmix issue. I can confirm that I have my left front speaker back now when using stereo upmix with 2ch audio sources on an N100 box.

Jeff

You can use an internal SSD with a Raspberry Pi 5. Here's a picture of my test unit. SSDs do increase the price of the Raspberry Pi 5 to where an N100 box is close in overall cost and performance.

Jeff

The point I was trying to make earlier in my post but got a bit off track with the numbers is that I agree with you. An SSD will help with storage I/O but most folks won't see much of a difference. I have a few Raspberry Pi devices and only one has an SSD, my test unit and that was mainly to see what was involved in adding an SSD. SD card reliability has improved but isn't at the level of SSDs. Reliability would be the main thing which would drive me to put an SSD in a Raspberry Pi.

Jeff

Quote from LeannLL

Hi

In Internet and Youtube I saw “It’s time to ditch microSD”

I'm still new to Raspberry and co.

A MicroSD card is much easier to use. Have you installed an SSD in your Raspberry 5? My main use case is streaming from Jellyfin server (network traffic). Can anyone say whether the performance is significantly better with SSD instead of SDcard?

best regards

I view the SSD vs SD card discussion more of a question of reliability vs. performance with Kodi / LibreElec but SD card reliability has improved significantly over the past 5 years. As mentioned above the main advantage of SSD for performance is disk I/O. I run Mezzmo, which is similar to your Jellyfin server, and have an endpoint performance Wiki page where I compare certain performance characteristics.

The displaying of 150 items is mainly a function of computing power to parse the server response and display the items in LibreElec. The full sync compares disk I/O. This particular Raspberry Pi 5 being tested has an SSD in it for the Kodi database. If I switched it back to the SD card I suspect the performance would drop by 2-3X but the Mezzmo sync progress is a background process so the user is unlikely to see the difference. I am not sure how Jellyfin syncs the client to the server but I believe it does based upon the operating mode. If there is interest I can switch back to the SD card and post the comparison results ? The Raspberry Pi 4 listed is running an SD Card.

Thanks,

Jeff

So interestingly enough I upgraded VMWorkstation to 17.5 on my other server and Kodi running under Windows 10 on a Guest VM stopped working due to display driver issues. I ended up solving this the same way I did for the LibeElec OVAs. I had to do 3 things.

First, change the VM hardware compatibility for the Windows 10 Guest running Kodi to VM Workstation version 12.0. Second replace the ATI video card with the nVidia video card and third add the same mks.enableGLRenderer = "TRUE" configuration line to the VM config file.

Jeff

Quote from chewitt

The DXxxRenderers config probably has no effect as DX display drivers are a Windows thing. Enabling GL should be be the only config item to have impact, though I'm wondering if that truly means GL (only)? as GBM images are using GLES not GL (as shown by logs that heitbaum shared).

Yeah, you are correct. Only mks.enableGLRenderer = "TRUE" is needed. Interesting that it doesn't work with my ATI card only the nVidia card. At least I found a solution.

Jeff

To update further, the trick of adding these 3 lines:

mks.enableDX12Renderer = "FALSE"
mks.enableDX11Renderer = "FALSE"
mks.enableGLRenderer = "TRUE"

only works with my nVidia 710 cards and not my ATI Radeon 5450 video cards. I had to put the nVidia card back in my 17.5 system and both OVAs started working. With the ATI card I get an error about a bad value with the mks.enableGLRenderer = "TRUE" statement. The good news is that I have more of the nVidia cards laying around and they are still available for purchase.

I did some further reading and VM Workstation 17.5 wants video cards which support DIVX 11.1 and mine are older and limited to 11.0. I suspect that may be why others are working, depending upon the video cards and how new they might be.

Jeff