Posts by sunny

Just chiming in to say my Pi4 running LE 11.01 had frozen while I was away for a few days. After multiple full power-down reboots, it totally lost the ability to mount two external USB HDDs formatted with NTFS. I was lazy and didn't look at the boot logs, but I disconnected the HDDs from the Pi, mounted them on my Win 10 laptop, did a full chkdsk repair (found many little problems) and de-frag, then re-attached them to the Pi. All is well again and they mount and are accessible as normal.

It seems to be that if there is a general system crash, the HDD filesystem can be left in a 'dirty' state that can't be resolved by the ntfs3 driver after re-booting. Only the Windows native NTFS driver can fix all the issues.

Quote from elonesna

b4tman/squid for ARM seems popular and reliable to me, just look at the dockerfile on github, it does not have any type of deception:

Reading through the docker build files was something I was hoping to avoid, as I don't know what quite a few of the included packages and libraries are for without doing further research to assure myself they're trustworthy. I also want to find if others have used specific pre-built containers and found any discernable performance differences.

Maybe I'm just try to cheat too much and should do more of the investigation work myself?

Quote from aptalca

Docker containers contain their own OS and environment and dependencies and all inside the container. It doesn't need to match the host OS. Kernel is the main thing shared between the container and the host.

Umm, but that doesn't answer the question I asked, it's just a statement about the nature of Docker containers.... which I already know.

If you personally are running Squid as a container in Docker in LE 10 on a Pi4, then please advise which image you personally are using.

Quote from elonesna

If you want to find a squid docker container that works on ARM devices try this link https://hub.docker.com/search?q=squid…rchitecture=arm

Are you personally using any of those particular container images on your Docker on your Pi4, as per my question, or are you just giving me a link to all Arm based Squid images in Docker hub, which I already know about? Also, none of those images comes from what I consider to be a trusted or verified source, hence why I don't want to use them.

Keen to know who is running Squid in a Docker container on their Pi 4 via LE 10 and, if so, which particular flavour / release from which repository.

So far, all the trusted container images I've found are based on Ubuntu or similar Linux for arm64, so I can't use them.

Thanks.

If you're de-fragging via a 'PC', is that Windows and is the drive formatted as NTFS? If so, I don't think e4defrag will help much, as that's really for ext3 and ext4 volumes.

Why not backup the whole drive, format as ext4, then transfer the data back? Ext4 is very good with block allocation and self-defragging.

Quote from HiassofT

Please test with this build: https://www.horus.com/~hias/tmp/libr…759-4d9d4e2.tar, the issues sound a lot like the ones from this thread: Skipping/Stuttering on SD IPTV with 10.0.2

so long, Hias

WOW! That is an amazing improvement HiassofT! The jerkiness in the panning scenery is totally gone when I stream the source *.TS file from the Pi3 TVHeadend server to the TVHeadend client on the Pi4. With the Pi4's video set to 1080 @ 50hz with no auto display rate adjusting, all the movement is smooth with the de-interlacing being nice and crisp too.

Excellent news that this will be going into LE10.0.03, and thanks for the help.

Quote from noggin

Where are you based ? What is your TV backend ?

It sounds as if you are actually receiving 1080i @ 25fps and need your Pi 4B to deinterlace to 1080p @ 50fps to ensure you get fluid 50Hz motion on sources with 50Hz motion.

Having a sample clip would assist fault finding.

Sorry about the confusion. I got my facts wrong about the source TV channel's framerate. Yes, it is 25fps. I was opening the files with VLC with auto de-interlacing turned on and it was re-encoding it to 50fps.

The source is two AU channels called SBS One HD and SBS Viceland HD which transmit 1080i content at 25fps, encoding is H264 - MPEG-4 AVC. I am using a Raspberry Pi3 with a TV HAT board and the latest OSMC + TVHeadend Server to do the recording. I stream and playback the recorded TV to a Pi4 running LE10.0.2 + TVHeadend Client. The Pi4 video display is set 1080p @ 50hz. Any funky motion effects / filter on the TV are turned off.

If I set the LE Pi4's system > video to 25hz, the playback with de-interlacing enabled is worse; it looks like slow motion and is very, very jerky, everywhere. If I set the LE Pi4's system > video to 50hz and enable Adjust display refresh rate in player > videos, it is just as awful and jerky. Disabling the de-interlacing is the only way to get smooth motion, albeit with the poorer image quality.

If I copy the source *.TS file to my Win PC and put it through AVIDemux to change it to 50fps (and trim out all the advertising), the resulting *.MP4 file, when copied to and played locally on the Pi4, plays with no jerkiness visible.

The jerky effect is most noticeable when the subject is held in the centre of the frame and the background is panning past. For example, in bike races when the peloton is being tracked by a camera in a helicopter or motorbike and the trees / building go rolling past, that's when it's very visible.

I have a few good sample *.TS files where the effect is noticeable in specific sections, but the files are waaay too big. I will try and find some sporting content that might show it and record it so that it's raw file. I'll also do some testing of copying the raw *.TS files @ 25fps to the Pi4 and play them compared to the ones converted to *.MP4 @ 50fps

Quote from ApexDE

sunny

Could you provide a sample of a problematic recording? My stuttering issue could be resolved by the devs with a sample.

I've done more testing, and the problem is not the recordings, it's the de-interlacing. I setup my other Pi4 with LE10.0.1 and the visual effect isn't there, but of course I get the slightly 'grainer' interlaced image.

When I play the same file on my laptop via VLC with de-interlacing enabled, the background panning is perfectly smooth, but my laptop has a fast i7 processor and dedicated NVidia GPU!

Quote from hagaygo

Hi, on my 2 setups with rpi4 on LE 10.0.2 playback of interlaced content is just fine (except the issue i posted on RE: LE 10.0.2 RPI4 recorded tv seeking issues).

2 things i can think of that you can check :

1.Play the same file on other device , maybe the problem is in the specific file (some broadcasts do broadcast "judder" on their content).

2.Make sure your video refresh rate is indeed 50hz while playing back the file , I had an issue with refresh rate change on playback when i had a delay of 1 sec setup on kodi settings.

Yep, checked all that. I also tried changing the Pi4 video display down to the original broadcast rate of 25fps, still the same.

When I play some recorded TV files that are 720i @25fps, the Pi4 can de-interlace them just fine. The PRIME based de-interlacing codec + the Pi4's hardware just isn't fast enough to cope.

The visual effect of the background juddering as it pans across the screen is very, very mild, but for me it is just visible enough to be distracting. Maybe others just aren't as visually attuned to such things as me and to them the result is good enough?

RESOLVED. I've done a range of tests and it turns out it is the new hardware based de-interlacing with the Pi4 that is the cause of the problem.

If I disable the de-interlacing, the video pans smoothly and I don't get the juddering effect.

I've made a note of this in the LE10 and de-interlacing in RPi4 thread.

With LE10.0.2 on my Pi4 compared to LE10.0.0, I've noticed that the H264 encoded *.TS files from my TVHeadend server, recorded in 1080p @ 50ps with interlacing, now play with distinct 'judder' or 'jerkiness', especially when the image has a slowly panning background.

The same file played on my Pi3 with OSMC (Kodi19.4), shows the video with interlacing, but at least the image pans smoothly and the irritating jerky visual effect on the background is not present. Kodi on both Pis has been set with identical display and video settings.

I think the de-interlacing using hardware decoding on the Pi4 still has some a way to go yet. In the meanwhile, I've disable de-interlacing by default for all videos, as I prefer the result.

I've been running TVHeadend Client on my Pi4 since LE10.0 and not had any problems. With the recent upgrade to LE10.0.2, I've noticed the playback of recorded TV has mild jerkiness / judder when playing back recorded 1080p / 50fps files. If I copy and play the raw *.TS file from the TVHeadend Server (A Pi3 running OSMC with Kodi 19.4), to the Pi4 and play it directly, it has the same effect. If I convert the raw *.TS file to *.MP4 and play it directly on the Pi4, I see it too.

However, when I play the raw *.TS file on the Pi3, the effect doesn't happen, but I get an interlaced picture instead.

It seems to be related the new HW decoding for H264 and de-interlacing. I've tried both the force_turbo=1 and the core_freq_min=500 settings in config.txt, but seen no difference.

Try turning off the TV totally (no power) and let it sit awhile before turning it back on. My Samsung randomly gets CEC 'lock' and just doesn't want to play nicely with the attached Pis until it's sat in the naughty corner for a while.

As others have said, the WiFi antenna on the Pi4 is very small, so range is limited. I also experienced the erratic WiFi performance when booted off a USB thumb drive. I added a short USB extension cable and the issue went away.

Since both my Pi4s are behind a TV and in close to my internet router, I found it was easier to just use ethernet instead. The less things transmitting on 5Ghz in close proximity to the router the better.

I had the exact same issue with a Pi4 with LE10 connected via ethernet to a switch. Even with 'Wait for network' enabled with timeout at 30 seconds, and even if I set all the IP settings for the connection manually instead of using DHCP, the 'connect automatically' switch would not stay enabled.... if the Pi or the switch was rebooted, the network connection became idle and had to be manually refreshed to connect.

The problem went away after a did a full clean install of LE 10 and re-did all my settings instead of importing from a LE 9 backup, which also fixed a range of other small, funky things.

I did a full clean install and manual re-build of settings, and all seems good so far.

I added Hifi Berry digi+ support for my Pi4 using the method described on the HiFi Berry site and all worked fine, same as with LE 9.

It was a full clean install to a new USB thumb drive, but I did import my old LE 9 settings from a backup, because I'm lazy, so I'll do a full clean install and do all the settings manually.

Bummer. Even after setting all the CEC settings, it still randomly stalls and I get the input lag via the TV remote.

I'm generally getting a range of other 'lag' and performance issues with LE 10 on my Pi 4B that I wasn't having with LE 9, so I'll wait for the next round of patches / updates and see what changes.