Posts by jim_p

  • Adding boot parameters to the rpi (and any arm build probably)

    What if I told you that wifi reception on the rpi3b (as shown under libreelec settings > connections) is equally bad with an external usb wireless card too?

    I have a tplink wn722n v1 (the one with the atheros chipset, with antenna) and a wn821n (atheros chipset too, no antenna) and both of them barely get over 30-32% of signal strength.

    If there is any connman command I can run from a terminal in order to show you that, please tell me. If not, I will resort to iwlist and do some grepping.

  • Adding boot parameters to the rpi (and any arm build probably)

    So, I reflashed the img last night and rebooted twice with no issues. I then installed greek and confluence and called it a day.

    First boot of the day today and although kodi was using confluence and greek, it was not connected to the wireless network. In fact, it re-asked me to add the wifi key when I clicked connect, as if it did not save it in the first place. There are no messages similar to the above so far, but here is the pastebin output you requested. I will look for them and post again if needed.

    http://ix.io/3Yxx

    Minor issues that I have since the previous installation

    - once kodi starts, a small notification pops up at the bottom right corner saying about it not being able to connect to a remote server

    - wifi reception at my tv is bad in general, but with le 11 is at ~30 % while on le 9 it was at ~45%

    - I use putty 0.76 (under linux) to ssh to it and with le 11 the terminal flickers badly when I write many or long lines of text, which was also not an issue on le 9

    p.s. Other that confluence and greek, I may have configured some aspects of kodi and I may have added my dlna server to check something for a future issue report on kodi's github. It is way to early to remember them now, but if you see anything like that in the log, please do not mention them.

    ---edit

    As for the checksum of the files, the releases.json file contains the sha256sums for all the files that are hosted under test.libreelec.tv. I verified mine before reflashing it on the sd and it was correct.

    ---re-edit

    Same thing happened on the 2nd (fresh) boot of the day that I did just now. Wireless did not connect automatically and I had to reenter the key. So far, there has been no notification about filesystem corryption and here is a new pastebin output that looks almost the same as the one earlier.

    http://ix.io/3Yy3

    ---re-re-edit

    And it just gave me the corrupted filesystem notification just now. I wanted to check if a subtitle ussue was fixed, so I disconnected it from the tv, moved it close to my router, ssh'ed to it and downloaded a video (sintel) and its subtitles on it with wget. I then shut it down and moved it back to the tv.

    Oddly enough, it booted just fine, there were no fixing messages in dmesg and it connected to the wifi network with no issues. Here is a new paste if anyone wants to check.

    http://ix.io/3Yyl

  • Adding boot parameters to the rpi (and any arm build probably)

    And it just booted with issues again. There was no notification at the boot log that anything is corrupt, just a small one at the very end that the network is starting.

    After that, it booted to a stock kodi with estuary in english, but with everything else installed (I installed yputube, twitch and the 2 inputstream addons earlier). It also had no network connection and I had to reconnect it to my wifi.

    In dmesg there are 7 lines that say

    Code
    EXT4-fs error (device mmcblk0p2): __ext4_find_entry:1623: inode #294924: comm kodi.bin: checksumming directory block 0

    so yea, something is happening on the filesystem. I will reflash it when I have time. Are there any checksums to validate the img files of the test builds?

  • Adding boot parameters to the rpi (and any arm build probably)

    Thank you for your support. There is indeed a /flash/cmdline.txt in there that looks like the arm version of /flash/syslinux.cfg. I will edit it and report back, although it seems to be what I want.

    I will also try a different card if the problem persists. The card was bought with the 3b+ ~3 years ago and it has been used for very little time, i.e. 1-1.5 months of total usage. When I decided to install lakka on the 3b+, I got a new card and installed it there, but it also has less than 1 month of total usage.

    As for the command, it returns

    Code
    # vcgencmd get_throttled
throttled=0x0

    Can I assume there is no issue there?

  • Adding boot parameters to the rpi (and any arm build probably)

    Hello everyone :)

    Now that kodi 20a1 is released and libreelec's nightlies use it, I decided to try it on my rpi3b+. It was on le 9.2.8, but since its update to le 10 was delayed until 10.0.2, it was left unused for months now.

    So, instead of setting le 10 from scratch, I decided to flash the latest nightly (20220522-ffda0f7 as of today). Everything went fine on first boot, I connected it to my wireless network and shut it down to continue the next day.

    And this morning, for the first time ever, I was greeted with a corrupted filesystem notification!

    I let it idle for 120seconds, the fixing procedure started and when it reached kodi again, it was not connected to the network. I reconnected it, installed confluence and the greek language pack and shut it down again, because it makes me mad to control it with the tv's remote and I prefer ssh for stuff that can be done that way.

    On the next boot, the same message showed up, I let it do the same, it reached kodi again (kodi was in greek and with confluence), but the network had to be set up again. I thought unplugging its power supply might cause the corruption issue, so I left it connected.

    Long story short, I shut down or rebooted almost 10 times and half of them showed this recovery message. And once, le started in safe mode, but it booted normally after that. I want to troubleshoot it further, so I want the boot output to be shown.

    On the 2 x64 installations of le (9.2.6 and 10.0.2) that I have, I have set a couple of boot parameters in /flash/syslinux.cfg and from this

    Code
     quiet

    I now have this

    Code
    quiet nosplash progress nofsck

    and I have a beautiful boot log showing instead of the splash screen.

    On arm architectures though, there is no /flash/syslinux.cfg but a /flash/config.txt which has a lot more text inside it. So, assuming that the forementioned parameters work regardless of the architecture, how can I add them to my rpi too?

    I read about the file that has the parameters and how to edit it here

    https://wiki.libreelec.tv/configuration/config_txt

    and about the boot parameters themselves here (lines 971 to 1069).

    LibreELEC.tv/init at 36dcdfdc8b9b1de48fa794edf1289248a875abfc · LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv
    Just enough OS for KODI. Contribute to LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv development by creating an account on GitHub.
    github.com

  • Kodi 19 fails to start on old intel gpu with i915 because it loads the wrong libva_driver

    Goodmorning everyone. Here is a weirder thing I noticed with le 10 on a different laptop (intel t4300, ati 4570, 4gb of ram).

    Once it leaves the boot options screen (the one that says installer, live and run), it starts switching between an all red/green/blue/white/black screen and a couple of gradient ones! On the same system, le 9 boots fine.

    The forementioned system fails to boot from another usb stick with ventoy and a couple of isos. It shows the ventoy boot menu, but when selecting any iso, it stops forever at the blinking cursor on the top left corner.

  • Kodi 19 fails to start on old intel gpu with i915 because it loads the wrong libva_driver

    It seems I made a huge mistake on the le 9 installation. It is the old one I have on the intel laptop mentioned at the top of the thread and I had created a file that sets the libva driver manually, as mentioned by lrusak here. I probably wanted to have it ready beforehand, for the upgrade to le 10.

    Minimum opengl version for kodi 19 under linux · Issue #19521 · xbmc/xbmc
    Bug report I have an old laptop with a libreelec installation since early July 2019. I think it started with kodi 18.2 back then and it has been successfully…
    github.com

    Removing that file made h264 videos play with hardware acceleration again, but with the same artifacts that I mentioned above for le 10.

  • Kodi 19 fails to start on old intel gpu with i915 because it loads the wrong libva_driver

    I am bringing this back because today I came accross the most weird playback issue. SInce May, I moved to the stable version of le (10.0.0 as of today) and I am still setting it up from scratch, using a usb stick and a persistent installation on it (the run option at the boot menu).

    So, I came accross an old hp laptop with amd turion which has a tiny ir remote control (rc1762307/01) and I wanted to test the remote! It works good in general, although the buttons in the top row need remapping because they do all sorts of weird stuff, e.g. the dvd button acts like the stop one and stops playback.

    The laptop has this gpu which presumably does vaapi video decoding according to vainfo

    But when a video is played with vaapi decoding, this happens (attached image). If I disable vaapi for h264 (and for everything else) the video plays fine, and it just stresses the cpu. On h265 videos, where vaapi does not work, the videos look fine too, although they are too choppy.

    Why does this happen?