Posts by fbicknel

I'm never sure whether I should post here or find a Kodi forum, so i throw myself at the mercy of the masses.

I have this one video that reliably hangs at a particular spot. I haven't watched the entire movie yet, but it's about 54 minutes in and is fine before and after the hang (for at least a little while).

Kodi crashes -- with a log (password MBX4teZmuc --

I've opened the movie on another machine running Ubuntu + both "Videos" (the default Ubuntu video viewer and VLC. Both of these handle the troubled spot just fine.

Anyway... it's not a huge deal, but I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions.

P.S. normally, this installation on a RPI4 behaves very well. Once in a while, we'll be watching TV on it and it will hang, but it's very rare. This has been the first one that's completely reproducible.

Here's a thread that might help:

Update libreelec

Oh, aye!

I saw where it was fighting with my pi-hole, so I set the DNS servers to something known...

aaaaaand it works!

Thanks for the hint!

Not familiar with the journalctl | paste, so here that is verbatim (some HTML was generated):

And here is the output of journalctl, in case that's what you meant:

After all that, looking up at the screensaver: it's still partying like it's 2019.

Last night, my Kodi system choked when a show ended (separate issue; water under the bridge.)

I reinstalled kodi on a new SD card, then copied everything from /STORAGE to the new card after it expanded the filesystem. All offline, except the expansion of the /STORAGE filesystem.

Anyway, everything is back 100% except it won't set the time properly.

I set the timeservers to 0.us.pool.ntp.org and 1.us.pool.ntp.org (they were whatever they were before that... remember, it used to work.) I rebooted and the time changed by about 2 hours. Neither time was even close: minutes were off; hours not as if it were GMT or anything. Timezone set properly.

Pastebin of debug log during a reboot: Kodi debug log of reboot - Pastebin.com I believe all details about versions and hardware should be in that file.

(set log to debug, reboot, set log normal, recover log file)

Note even the date is wrong... it somehow thinks it's April 2019.

Not sure what else I can do here. Suggestions are most welcome, please.

Terribly sorry for not replying, chewitt .

I decided to give up on it until I had the display all straightened out.

Got a new Pioneer receiver that's 4K capable and have it all set up now. It's been working pretty well for a few weeks, now.

Unfortunately, some 4K movies still show artifacts at the top of the frame which "bleed" down into the picture. The stuttering and hesitations are gone, now. Thankfully.

This happens on several 4K movies (Stream #0:0(eng): Video: hevc (libx265), yuv420p10le, 3840x1608 [SAR 1:1 DAR 160:67], q=2-31, 23.98 fps, 1k tbn, 23.98 tbc (default), if that's helpful).

They play ok on my laptop... but it has a GPU, and I suspect that could be key here.

I've attached a screenshot of the offensive artifacts. The more action, the more of them there are. I had to severely cut it down, as there's apparently a 1MB file size limit.

Oh, wow: STILL? "Newly created posts will remain inaccessible for others until approved by a moderator."

Simpler solution: run the Pi all the time. It takes very little power, especially if it's not doing anything.

Ok... things have settled down a bit.

The 2001 ASO movie continued to give me hesitation issues, so I decided to switch media to a smaller file of roughly the same resolution.

This one is apparently 3840x1744 23.976. The hesitation is still there, although subjectively milder.

I discovered a few new tools to use, so here's a screenshot or three....

These two show an increase in drop and skip values. Unfortunately, I soon learned that these only occurred when I took a screenshot. As I watched the movie with these statistics running, I never saw either of these go up spontaneously. So the hesitations are not due to drops or skips, imho.

Here are some more facts about the movie:

I had to crop this one a bit to fit the 1MB requirement here.

Kodi debug log while 4k movie is running - Pastebin.com <- the log

On other fronts, 1080p is very good. I have the sound issues at bay: it's not perfect, but it's very good. Passing the sound through the TV seems to remove the surround information from the stream, which seems perfectly logical. The receiver adds some of it back in, so at least it doesn't seem to all come from the front. But TV viewing is very nice even if movies are slightly less enjoyable on the sound front. I suppose my next venture is a 4k-capable receiver through which I can pass the signal.

I did put the hdmi_enable_4kp60=1 directive back and it seems to make no difference.

[Sorry for all the edits. I'm not allowed to post more often that 2bazillian seconds, so the only thing I can do is edit my original post. No one can see the post yet anyway.... *sigh* When I'm done and everything's resolved, I'll add a bit at the end to summarize.]

I'll start a new thread, as I've abused someone else's thread long enough (my apologies.)

So I started out with upgrading my Rpi3 to a 4 and of course getting LE 9.2.1.

Things are running ok in 1080p, but I'm having a couple of problems with the new panel.

1) No sound. I've tried eliminating the Pioneer video receiver -- so the HDMI cable is plugged directly into the TV's HDMI1 input. (more on the receiver in a moment) I've checked Kodi's audio settings and reset them all to default. The tv doesn't have much to say here, just a choice of speaker or optical out or bluetooth: I have it set to internal speakers. The TV seems to work ok at other audio tasks. Not sure what else I can check here, but my next stop is to google troubleshooting sound on Kodi.

Well that turned out to be a simple fix: I used the other HDMI port on the Pi and the sound came back. After shutting down the Pi, I unplugged the power, moved the HDMI cable to the port closest to the power port, then started things up again. *poof* I had sound. I suppose that second port can't do sound. I didn't read the directions. Now to find that S/PDIF cable and see if that will work.

2) 1080p movies play just fine (no sound). I've whitelisted: 3840x2160p 30/29.97/25/24/23.98 and 1080p 60/59.94/50 (curious: there are two 1920x1080p 60 settings... I whitelisted them both.) My test movie (2001 ASO), still has the hesitation issues, but otherwise plays ok. A couple of movies that report 3840x1616 23.976fps are playing, but with weird artifacts. I suspect a mismatch issue that my cpu can't handle. Hm. Actually the second of those is 3840x1608 instead of 1616... meh. I guess those movies are probably just not going to work here. Curiously, a movie that is formatted 3840x2160 23.976 seems to play fine for a while, but then goes black for some reason. Update: I changed the default gui display to 4k and now the movie is playing mostly ok. There's an occasional jerk on long, slow pan shots, but it's a better experience than the 2001 movie. The 2001 movie is also 3840x2160 23.976. I wonder if it might be defective. I just don't have another source to verify.

Anyway... back to the task at hand.

Side note: when I was checking out the 3840x2160 movie that went black, I had the gui set to 1080p. I suspect I was trying to use the OSD to check out the video format when it went black. When I tried to leave the movie running and use the gui, the whole box hung and I had to reset it. That's when I decided to change the gui to 4k and that cleared up the simultaneous gui+movie-in-the-background issues.

Another side note: I couldn't get any 4k resolutions to appear in the gui when connected through my (ancient) Pioneer video receiver. I suspected that the old hardware can't handle 4k and thus always reports the attached panel as 1080p. Eliminating the old hardware fixed that issue. I think I can get the old S/PDIF optical audio cable from the tv to the receiver and do that instead. Later.

Insofar as the 4k issue is concerned: I seem to have proven for myself what chewitt told us over in the other thread: matching video formats work, mismatches not so much, except 1080p->4k.

Anyway, I just wanted to share how things were progressing. I'm off to see what I can do with the sound situation. But 4k is not quite all there, it would seem

I will try putting the hdmi_enable_4kp60=1 back in the config.txt and reboot... maybe that will help with the hesitation issues?

Very very illuminating and helpful, chewitt.

I was hoping it was the old (2002 Samsung) TV that was contributing to the problem.

Now that I know this, I can feel more confident about the conversion to 4k coming up.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, chewitt, that helps.

My goal with the new rpi4 upgrade was to get that hardware squared away before the 4k tv purchase. (The old rpi3 will become something like a pi-hole or the like.) (A second rpi4 is on the way with plans to make it an NFS server for the household... but now I'm way off topic. Sorry.)

Your comment about my panel being 1080p seems to hint that there's extra work for the processor to change my (test) movie's 4k format to 1080p.

Would I be correct to assume that upgrading the panel to 4k might improve things?

Is there a similar issue with older movies that are 1080p if they were shown on the 4k display? Or is that a much "easier" conversion for the processor(s) involved?

... and now I'm off to see what all that acronym stuff at the end of your note is all about. Should be a good read.

Nice trick, mglae... I would have put it in the script, but your solution gets points for creativity.

Well, it would seem you need to install the jq utility

kodi:~ # which jq
/storage/.kodi/addons/virtual.system-tools/bin/jq
kodi:~ # jq
jq - commandline JSON processor [version 1.6]

Either that or -- and this is the more likely answer -- you need to specify a path in your script or just call jq with an absolute path name instead of relying on $PATH.

That's where I would start if I were you.

edit:

I just read you said it works when you ssh to the box. That means the second answer I gave is almost certainly the correct one.

I have a similar problem, but not as severe: 4k video exhibits hesitations -- perhaps even slowdowns without actually stopping -- but without audio problems. Regular HD videos appear to be ok.

I have a rpi4 and libreelect 9.2.1 just upgraded yesterday. I added hdmi_enable_4kp60=1 to my setup.txt and while I was there changed gpu_mem to 512k.

(From what I read, that last one may have been ineffectual.)

Before I made those changes to the setup file, the same hesitations were present, but if I tried to run the movie and look at the cpu stats from the main menu, the screen would blank and the sound would hesitate and it was just a general mess. Stop the stats and just watch the movie and it went back to mild (but annoying) hesitations.

After the changes, all that went away.... alas except the mild hesitation in the video.

I tried your suggestion to whitelist only the 59.94 and 60 hz video formats in the whitelist. (I do not have a 50 available: presumably because we're in the land of 60Hz.

I do not yet have a 4k TV, so a) this isn't terribly important to me yet and b) there are no higher resolutions available in the menu as one might expect.

Here's running:

bick-ubtu3 ~$ iperf -c kodi --port 5201
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to kodi, TCP port 5201
TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 192.168.2.128 port 59088 connected with 192.168.2.120 port 5201
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec   732 MBytes   614 Mbits/sec
bick-ubtu3 ~$

I took a few screenshots of an HD movie, a UHD movie, and iperf running. Here they are:

So I don't think there's a network issue.

I watched the cpu temp and whether it was throttled as the movie runs and the cpu never went above 47° and that's not even close to throttling. It never showed as throttled, either.

(BTW, that's in a FLIRC case with no fan. I had my RP3 in a FLIRC case and it did very well with no fan. Looks like RP4 is doing ok, too.)

One more bit of data: the onscreen player process info (key 'O') shows this:

Video decoder: ff-hevc-mmal (HW)

Pixel format: rpi

Deinterlace method: none

Video stream: 3,840x2,160 px1.78 AR, 23.976 FPS

Audio stream: FL, FR, FC, LFE, SL, SR, ff-eac3, 32 bits, 48,000 Hz

System memory usage: 12% (stable) System CPU usage; (all over the place as usual, bbut max seems to be 37% for brief moments, dodging from one cpu to the other... lows in the single digits, most teens to 20's. I know. Not terribly [word meaning science in the adjectival form]. )

top shows the load average to be 1.33, 1.00, 0.9 as the movie runs. That's a little more [word meaning science in the adjectival form].

Anyone know what's going on here?

P.S. If you're wondering why [word meaning science in the adjectival form] instead of ... erm... I dare not say it ... it's because I got this message as I tried to save:

oops. well, there apparently I said it.

P.P.S.

Here's a video I took with my phone that demonstrates the stutter issue.

Looks like something amiss in login.sh. Can you post that?

Well. Apparently, I'm the second person to ask for it.

I'll poke around and see if I can figure out how to install it.