Posts by jim_p

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

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV620/M82 [Mobility Radeon HD 3450/3470]
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company RV620/M82 [Mobility Radeon HD 3450/3470]
Kernel driver in use: radeon

libva info: VA-API version 1.11.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/r600_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_11
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.11 (libva 2.11.1)
vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 21.0.3 for AMD RV620 (DRM 2.50.0 / 5.10.47, LLVM 11.0.1)
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Simple              : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Main                : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileNone                   : VAEntrypointVideoProc

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?

Do you mean everything shown in here? I will try it later then.
tqdm/tqdm at master · tqdm/tqdm · GitHub

---edit!

It worked! Thank you very very much!

Now I have to make my bash script show some notification inside kodi. I think this good enough

# kodi-send --action="Notification(Now Loading..., myscript.py)"

That seems more doable than to remove all the references to that lib and its functions. I like it
But where can I find that lib? Debian gets it from here, but isn't this just the source code?

GitHub - tqdm/tqdm: A Fast, Extensible Progress Bar for Python and CLI

Almost worked! Actually, the entire idea and the shell script worked as it should. If only the python script did not have that extra dependency for the the tqdm library

from tqdm import tqdm
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'tqdm'

I will try removing the offending line and see how it goes...

Klojum

Please excuse my "lazyness". The past 2 days were exhausting for me. I was up at 5 am (on sunday too) and had to go through the day with all my nerves hitting "peak performance" for at least 12 hours straight.

mglae

Great! Now can I use it like so?

pythonwrapper myscript.py

I will test it in 4+ hours.

Probably not the right place to ask, but I am too tired to open a new thread now.

There is a python3 script I want to run on my le 10 x64 installation and it needs the requests library (python3-requests is the name of the package in debian).

And it fails to run because this python library is missing. Pip is also missing, so I can not install it by hand. Can I somehow use kodi's script.module.requests to run it?

You are right. The command "parted -l", which i just learned it exists, shows a lot more partitions and info.

Little Faye, a 6yo girl, asked me yesterday: How many cartoons can this tvbox keep?

I checked its free space and dound out it has a little bit over 4.5gb, with nothing it it but le and a couple of kodi addons. It seems weird for a device that has 8gb of storage, so I decided to investigate it further.

Here is what I found using various commands, since fdisk and lsblk are not available in le. Blkid reports 3 partitions, although I thought there were only 2, for flash and storage respectively

# blkid
/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/cache: UUID="57f8f4bc-abf4-655f-bf67-946fc0f9f25b" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/system: UUID="0c757ab5-f929-46a0-854d-3c2c6bf1ac14" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/data: UUID="a9e78873-d2e1-4262-afd0-acb94fb7d766" TYPE="ext4"

I assume /dev/cache is on tmpfs, because df -h reports

# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                302.7M      4.0K    302.7M   0% /dev
/dev/system             975.9M    158.6M    801.3M  17% /flash
/dev/loop0              157.5M    157.5M         0 100% /
/dev/data                 4.6G    199.7M      4.3G   4% /storage

These sum up to ~5.5bg. But in parted > print, the entire 8gb of space are shown

(parted) print
print
Error: /dev/rsv: unrecognised disk label
Model: Unknown (unknown)
Disk /dev/rsv: 8389kB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/524288B
Partition Table: unknown
Disk Flags:

So what happened to those missing ~2.5gb? Can I resize the /storage partition so as to use them too?

Relevant outputs from le 10 x86 running from an 8gb usb stick (persistent installation)

# blkid
/dev/sda1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL_FATBOOT="LIBREELEC" LABEL="LIBREELEC" UUID="1008-0301" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="system" PARTUUID="98a01279-96ec-4231-b15f-1f4ccda52b53"
/dev/sda2: LABEL="STORAGE" UUID="4a9679c7-fc56-47ed-8780-61a4f0a3914a" BLOCK_SIZE="1024" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="storage" PARTUUID="fd6ecfc9-f42c-4fe8-872f-7c6afe3c4967"
/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"

# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                806.5M      4.0K    806.5M   0% /dev
tmpfs                   375.9M      8.8M    367.1M   2% /run
/dev/sda1               511.7M    263.1M    248.6M  51% /flash
/dev/loop0              243.0M    243.0M         0 100% /
/dev/sda2                 6.7G    178.9M      6.5G   3% /storage

(parted) print
print
Model: SanDisk Cruzer Fit (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 8004MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name     Flags
 1      4194kB  541MB   537MB   fat16        system   legacy_boot, msftdata
 2      541MB   8004MB  7463MB  ext4         storage

Notice that bottom part of parted that mentions the partitions and their sizes? Why is it missing from the le of the tvbox?

Quote from chewitt

It's available as a manual update, although if you are running LE 9.x please note that we strongly advise a clean install due to the Python2 > Python3 add-on changes in Kodi.

I have a few addons and I already know that they are python3 compatible. And now I am setting up le 10 from scratch (running from usb in persistent more) and I plan to back it up so as to restore it on the fresh install I am about to do on the same hw later on.

For me, it is not only the addons that I have to add. I also have to add sources (e.g. my dlna server), configure le (name, ssh, wifi, boot process etc) and kodi itself (locale, skin, remote access etc) and all that is a very tedious procedure.

So, leaving addons aside as the least annoying thing to (re-)do, would you advice for an in place upgrade from 9.2.6? I can wipe them clean from ~/.kodi/addons/, delete ~/.kodi/userdata/database/addonsXX.db (so that none of them will be listed as previously installed or active) and reinstall them fresh in minutes.

p.s. Skins, locales (= every resource.language.whatever) and le's addons (e.g. virtual.system-tools) do not count as extra addons

And he did that for ALL architectures/sbcs? Last time that devel build was updated was on August 30th (and on 29th for some architectures), unlike the nightly which was updated yesterday.

Anywya, I am busy setting up my stable le 10 installation from scratch and I will soon move away from the nightlies

I was away for some days and I lost some nightly releases. I noticed that there are 2 files now (for x86_64), one that has "-devel" in its name and one that has "-nightly".

What are their differences?

I took the all black mxq (= the one the family had issues connecting it to their wireless network) back home to test it.

It connected as it should on my wifi and had no issues playing anything. Then I gave it back to the family, without testing it on their home, and it connected to their wifi the first time it booted! It now works with no issues.

scratcheshead.gif

May I ask what this means?

Drivers for RPi2 and 3 are currently not yet feature complete and stable.

Le 9.x had drivers for it and le 10 does not? Is it the end for the rpi3?

And I admit the decision for dropping support for rpi 1/0 was correct. It started feeling sluggish even at 9.0 on my zero, so I switched to lakka for that sbc.

It is MY excuse
These adapters are so rare nowadays that they worth their size in gold bitcoin So I do not want to damage any of the 3.

As for the bridging with another router in order to provide wired connection to it.

Does this mean connecting them via ethernet? I know how it is done. But of all the people that I have suggested it as a solution all those years, only one has accepted it. People do not want wires running around their homes.

But enough with the offtopic. The family has not contacted me yet, so I will repost when I have news.

Thanks, I will do it later today.

I actually have 2 tplink wn722n v1 (v1` is the one with the atheros chipset, v2 and v3 have a realtek one), plus a wn821n which also comes with an atheros chipset.

I got the first wn722n back in early 2017 that I got my rpi zero non-w. And during the first lockdown in 2020 I was given another pi zero non-w, so I looked for the same card. I got it, and I lost it a few days later. It is in my house for sure, but I can not find it. And that is the reason I got the wn821n during the second lockdown.

I know that this is a very reliable card and that is sold very expensive in ebay etc because of its chipset which is very hacking friendly (kali linux + atheros card in monitor mode). All 3 were tested and they work great on my tvboxes (mxq and mxqpro4k).

And because of that rarity, I do not trust them with anyone but me. Imagine 3 excited kids (plus their friends) running around a room and something protuding out of the tvbox. I give it 1 month before they break the adapter and the usb that is plugged in

Anyway. since the family has not called me today, I am trying to reproduce that timeout notification on my rpi3b+ by removing the network and connecting to it again. So far I have failed, but what shall I look for in dmesg or in a similar log whent it happens?

I think I had changed that to my country's domain before gifting the tvbox, but I will ask tomorrow. I have definitely changed it on le 9.2.x on my rpi3b+ and on ce on my mxqpro4k.

I also had that timeout issue on the first days of le 9.x (if not 8.x) on my rpi3b+. I was so upset back then that I wanted to throw my router out of the window, but I kept it because my isp forces its usage for voip telephony.

I do not think it is a reception issue so as to look for repeaters etc.

The router is about 5m (= 15ft) away from the tvbox and has almost visual contact (the router is "hidden" behind a corner). I will make a small sketch to show you if needed, but I do not know how to name various stuff in english.

Also, neither the router, nor the tvbox support 5ghz wireless and the only ethernet cable in the house (the one that connects the router to an old pc) is too short to cover that distance.

Rebooting the router had no effect too. Shall I bite the bullet and delete the forementioned folder?

---edit

I did delete the folder and now le shows all the wireless networks again.

However, it fails to connect to the home's wireless network, poping a notification that something timed out. Any ideas about that?