Posts by flexmcmurphy

I'm beginning to think it was an apt update and apt dist-upgrade that I ran the night before both my Pi4s stopped working. I've left two posts on the Pi forums but got no takers. After the first one gave the rainbow screen I put the same sd card in the other pi then it also gave the rainbow screen and neither have worked since then.

1. I tried updating the eeprom to the latest version. I get that blinking green light pattern with no sd card in there indicating it is ready to boot a card. Then I get no blinking green lights when I put an sd card in there, just rainbow screen on the TV.

2. The sd cards I am trying are the same ones the Pi4s were booting a day earlier... one has LibreELEC, another Ubuntu 20.04 for Pi4 and then Raspbian Buster Lite.

3. I used the Pi Imager Tool to download the latest Pi Buster Light 32-bit OS which is supposed to work on any Pi. The Pi 4s won't boot it but my Pi1 will.

4. The hdmi cable is working because I see the Pi 1 booting up on the TV.

5. I am using the official Pi power supply.

Looking at the Pi forums it seems a recent update is causing a lot of problems with chromium. Maybe the same update can brick a Pi4? I don't know what else to try except see if I can get them replaced under warranty.

Any ideas much appreciated!

Flex

Thanks CvH,

That explains why I get worse results when the tvheadend client and server are on separate Pis... lack of gigabit ethernet in the Pi3B+. I like the idea of that Digibit R1 firmware using TCP instead of UDP. That could reduce the continuity error count also.

Today I was all set to install tvheadend server on a Pi4 (which has gigabit ethernet) but for some reason both my Pi4s suddenly won't boot up. Now I just get a colourful/rainbow screen when I turn them on but they won't boot. I'm asking for help over on the Raspi Forums but not getting any responses!

Flex

Thanks CvH,

That's how I have set up my Tvheadend... Configuration > General > Base > DSCP/TOS = Default and nothing complicated anywhere else either.

I get a lot of continuity errors in the streams when the client is LibreELEC on a Pi4 and TVH is on a separate Pi3B+. Whereas if I also have the Kodi client in OSMC on the same Pi3B+ that TVH is on then I get less continuity errors. But I still get some errors and they are more likely when playing HD channels and I can't really stream more than one channel at a time or the continuity error count goes up even more.

I'm beginning to think that TVH is somehow extremely sensitive to imperfections in the signal along the cables coming from the satellite and terrestrial aerials on my roof. The SNR and Signal Strength are both at 73% now as I am playing a satellite radio channel and no errors at all. Using the same cables and reception equipment connected to my satellite decoder box gives a rock sold picture whether playing SD or HD channels and I can stream a second one fine using the enigma2 VU+ plugin from OpenwebIf.

So it's very frustrating to read other people having stable set-ups because I don't know how their setups are different from mine. There are so many different things that could be causing the continuity errors but no easy way to understand the exact source of the problem. Maybe I need to get a new dish and aerial, new cables and a new router too? I use minisatip running on my enigma2 satellite box (with enigma2 turned off) to feed TVH. Maybe a hardware sat>ip like the Digibit R1 would be better?

I will try installing TVH on the Pi4 and use LibreELEC on the Pi3B+ as the client but I think there is some kind of interference going on around the Pi that will still give me continuity errors regardless of what I try...

Flex

Thanks chewitt,

I tried what you suggested... Set "Adjust refresh" to start/stop. I also went in to the Whitelist menu and well I don't really know what I'm doing there but I went to System > Display > Whitelist and enabled these...

1920x1080p 60.00Hz

1920x1080p 59.94Hz

1920x1080p 50.00Hz

1680x1050p 60.00Hz

1600x900p 60.00Hz

1280x1024p 60.00Hz

1280x720p 60.00Hz

1280x720p 59.94Hz

1280x720p 50.00Hz

The Kodi Resolution is set to 1920x1080p

Refresh Rate: 50.00

Limit GUI size 1080p

I'm still getting blocky picture breakup all the time. I'm not sure what the reason is... My use case is watching live TV from a satellite dish and rooftop aerial piped through a sat>ip server (minisatip) to TVHeadend installed on a Pi3B+. When the picture is breaking up I see the "continuity error" count going up in TVHeadend. Maybe this means the source of the picture breakup is nothing to do with the Pi4 HTSP Client on LibreELEC?? Maybe network communication

Other things I tried:

I have a usb drive with movies recorded from the TV. I connected that to the Pi4 with the latest LibreELEC and the picture and sound is fine. So it's only live tv that is affected.

As mentioned above... the TVHeadend server is running on a Pi3 B+ installed on OSMC. Viewed through the osmc HTSP client on that Pi3B+ I get a far better picture although to confuse things, when I had both clients running... LibreELEC on Pi4 and OSMC on Pi 3B+ then both clients had constant picture breakup. Both are Kodi 18.6.

Chewitt, I read in another post that you have a Pi4. Have you ever used it with TVHeadend server to watch live TV? If so, did you manage to get a solid picture and what are your settings exactly?

Cheers,

Flex

Hello,

I bought a Pi 4, 4GB memory. I use it to run LibreELEC 9.2.1 for Pi 4 with the Tvheadend HTSP Client (Version 4.4.21.1). This connects to TVHeadend server running on a Pi3B+ that is running on OSMC but with the mediacenter on that Pi stopped... so it runs just (I think) Jessie.

I am getting lots of picture artifacts and occasional popping and squeaking of sound and sound falling out of sync with picture. In TVheadend server there are lots of continuity errors. The problem is worse on HD channels but no channel gives a solid clear picture, HD or SD.

What I have tried:

• The signal strength is good because when I hook the satellite cables and terrestrial cable up to my triple tuner enigma2 box the picture is solid.
• I also tested by plugging the terrestrial cable directly into the back of my TV and the picture is rock solid.
• I also tried playing with the de-interlaced settings... well I don't really know what I am doing with them but I tried them all and none helped.
• I set "Adjust Framerate" to "Always"... not sure if it made any big difference.

Here are some logs.. taken when viewing a particular terrestrial channel that gives rock solid picture when cable is connected directly to TV but gives constant picture break up when the co-ax cable is connected into an enigma2 satellite triple tuner box with minisatip running that feeds the channel to TVHeadend and then on to the LibreELEC Client.

paste /storage/.kodi/temp/kodi.log

dmesg | paste

By the way... I had set this up another way and still was getting some picture break up but much LESS breakup... I had the TVHeadend server on the PiB3+ running OSMC and using just this Pi on its own with the TVHeadend HTSP client also on that OSMC Kodi install. That gave some picture breakup still which is why I got the Pi4 because I thought I needed a more powerful and dedicated Kodi client to play the ip tv streams. But unfortunately I actually have even worse picture now with the Pi4.

Any help much appreciated!

Flex

Iridium

Well I know you can add more Samba share definitions in samba.conf but what I am asking about is how the LibreELEC team designed this to happen automatically regardless of what usb key you attach.

HiassofT

Thanks so much for this really helpful information. I started using Kodi with LibreELEC on a Pi 1 Model B. But recently I have been trying out OSMC because it is easier to install more stuff onto. However OSMC just haven't (yet?) got auto-mounting down like LibreELEC do. In LE my usb drives are always auto-mounted on boot but running OSMC on the exact same hardware this hardly ever works. The explanation given to me is that it is a "power issue" and to buy a powered USB hub. The USB drives seem to take a bit longer to spin up on boot so when udisks-glue runs at boot up the drives are not ready to mount. A workaround is to add a sleep 10 to the udisks-glue service.

I am trying to investigate if the LE method with udevil can be ported into OSMC and make my drives always mount on boot. Maybe there is something about OSMC that it draws more power at boot up and that stops the drives from spinning up fast enough and this will always stop even udevil working too? I don't know but I'll give it some more investigation anyway.

Thank you!

Flex

Hello,

I'm curious to understand how udevil and devmon are configured in LibreELEC to auto mount an attached usb drive at boot up and create a samba share for it.

Can someone give me the config steps? I would like to replicate that functionality elsewhere. Basically my other machine (OSMC on Pi) uses udisks and udisks-glue. I disabled those systemd services and installed udevil/devmon. The usb drives get mounted but then immediately get un-mounted again so they end up not mounted at all.

Also how does LibreELEC make a samba share with the name being the label of the usb drive?

Cheers,

Flex

For anyone reading this thread... I got a solution working that makes LibreELEC/Kodi recognise two file naming schemes.. the official Kodi compliant:

moviename year.ext

And another scheme that suits many movies I have in my collection that I recorded from TV such as:

20150813 2159 - NBC +1 - Prometheus.ts

The full thread is over on the Kodi forums.

Cheers,

Flex

Cheers Iridium,

I'll try the Kodi forum then. Renaming everything I have now would be bad enough but it's having to keep doing that with new content going forward I'd prefer not to have to do... probably a lot of people give up maintaining a Kodi media collection for that reason... too much effort... easier to just use Netflix and Spotify

Flex

I just started using LibreELEC and so far so great.

I have a large collection of movies that I recorded from the TV. The movies are created with filenames that are not recognised by the Movie DB add-on.

Filenames are always formatted like: "A - B - C" where A is a date, B is a TV channel and C is the movie name..

Here are some examples:

Filename: 20150813 2159 - NBC +1 - Prometheus.ts

Movie Name: Prometheus

Filename: 20150831 2159 - CBS+1 - The Bourne Identity.ts

Movie Name: The Bourne Identity

I understand that the best practice would be to rename all the files and even better to have each movie in its own folder with the name and year of the movie.

However I would like to try can I add another regular expression to the tmdb.xml file so it will match movie names from the file names I have and still manage to download the metadata?

I read this post about How to Write Media Scrapers and also from reading this Reddit Post I was thinking can I add a new regular expression in the tmdb.xml file something like this...

<CreateSearchUrl dest="3">
<RegExp input="$$7" output="&lt;url&gt;https://api.tmdb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=f090bb54758cabf231fb605d3e3e0468&amp;amp;query=\1@@@WCF_LITERAL_AMP@@@amp;year=$$4@@@WCF_LITERAL_AMP@@@amp;language=$INFO[language]&lt;/url&gt;" dest="3">
         <RegExp input="$$1" output="\1" dest="7">
              <expression>(\d{8} \d{4} -.*?- ?(.*)\.ts$)</expression>
         </RegExp>
</RegExp>
<CreateSearchUrl>

If this is possible then I'm also not sure which tmdb.xml file to edit. I searched and there are SIX:

/storage/.kodi/addons/metadata.common.themoviedb.org/tmdb.xml
/storage/.kodi/addons/metadata.themoviedb.org/tmdb.xml
/storage/.kodi/addons/metadata.tvshows.themoviedb.org/tmdb.xml
/usr/share/kodi/addons/metadata.common.themoviedb.org/tmdb.xml
/usr/share/kodi/addons/metadata.themoviedb.org/tmdb.xml
/usr/share/kodi/addons/metadata.tvshows.themoviedb.org/tmdb.xml

I looked at them all, checking for differences between them and they are not all the same, some have slightly different content.

After some more reading it looks like..

../http://metadata.common.themoviedb.org/tmdb.xml

and

../http://metadata.themoviedb.org/tmdb.xml

are a companion pair that work together and...

../http://metadata.tvshows.themoviedb.org/tmdb.xml

surely isn't what I need since I am scrapping for movie metadata.

The <CreateSearchUrl> tag is in...

../http://metadata.themoviedb.org/tmdb.xml

So now my questions are:

1. What is the difference between...

/storage/.kodi/addons/http://metadata.themoviedb.org/tmdb.xml

and

/usr/share/kodi/addons/http://metadata.themoviedb.org/tmdb.xml

2. Do I need to make changes to both files?

3. Is there any special way to "re-install" the add-on after or will it just work when I make the changes to the xml file?

Cheers,

Flex