Posts by arvidb

I got myself a Raspberry Pi 5 (4 GiB) instead and after using it for a couple of hours I'm cautiously optimistic that the third time's the charm! It has played all formats I've thrown at it flawlessly so far, including 1440p@50Hz VP9 (using roughly 50 % of all cores doing so). Besides actually working, it's much snappier in the menus and boots faster than the ROCK64.

Edit: BTW, I'm using a FLIRC case with the plastic top removed (it's snapped in place and can be easily removed - and put back again). The case gets warm but not excessively so while playing that 1440p@50Hz VP9 video mentioned above. I'm guessing about 45 °C.

Oh, the nightly above also crashes if I turn the TV off. (Discovered by chance the first time, tried it again - simply had LE sitting idle, turned the TV off then on again after a few seconds - and sure enough, no signal to the TV.)

I had a little bit of time now to try the latest nightly (https://test.libreelec.tv/12.0/Rockchip/…a-rock64.img.gz).

The issue remains: after a while (usually about 15 minutes, but it varies randomly and perhaps depending on source file; it can be just a few seconds or perhaps 30 minutes sometimes) the audio starts skipping/popping/crackling and the video starts to judder (very noticeably; it's not subtle). This seems to happen regardless of source resolution (1080p/1440p), frame rate (25/50/60 Hz), and format (H.264, HEVC, VP9).

This is with "Settings -> Player -> Videos -> Adjust display refresh rate" set to "On start/stop" and "Sync playback to display" enabled.

Unfortunately it makes the ROCK64 unusable as a HTPC for me.

Perhaps it's fixed in the community version? That's on my list of possible things to try. I also read a post here where someone had audio sync issues when streaming from NAS for some reason, which is what I'm doing too. So that's something else to explore. If/when I find the time...

Just as a heads-up to prospective buyers of the ROCK64: there seems to be a serious audio issue with ROCK64 under LE11. I haven't really had time to look into it much (I kinda gave up on upgrading the LibreELEC experience, at least for a while), but what happens is the audio starts to skip back and forth a few 10ths of a second after playing a video for a while. Seems to happen regardless of video format, and it makes speech unintelligible and music unlistenable.

I tried changing some settings to no avail. Enabling resampling makes it sound like a really out-of-whack vinyl player though. That was fun, for a while!

It's great to know that the community edition exists as an additional option, for sure! Thanks!

I have not. I almost haven't tried the official version yet. If the official version does everything I want it to I'm not sure why I would try the community version. We'll see.

Ok so I tried a different HDMI cable, a Deltaco "HDMI Premium certified cable"/"HDMI High Speed with Ethernet"/"4K UHD 60 Hz" one, and now things seem to work on both LE11 and LE10. Including CEC.

First glance: 1080p@25 Hz H.264 and H.265 looks flawless (and skipping is much faster than with the RPi2 I used before!). Even 1440p@50 Hz scaled to my TV's 1080p resolution looks great! (Again at first glance.)

First impressions with the ROCK64:

With the current official release (LE11), I get no picture at all.

With the old release (LE10), the board boots into 1024x768@60 Hz. CEC does not work.

This is using a Sony full-HD TV (KDL-32CX523) where HDMI works fine with LibreELEC on RPi2 and Odroid C4, and with various "full-size" computers.

Any ideas?

As someone who is currently running a RPi 2 with LE11, I can confirm everything that chewitt said. Playback of H.264 1080p@25Hz is flawless. (I haven't really tried higher frame rate videos.) And the GUI is noticeably laggy, but not unusably so. (And previous versions of LE was snappier.)

I haven't tried any overclocking.

Quote from chewitt

Odroid C4 should similarly support everything software decoded up to 1080p; upstream Linux support for everything except the media bits is solid and quite mature now. You might need to disable hardware decoding completely to solve the H264 issue; the current H264 support in the upstream kernel uses the VDEC driver for GXBB/GXL/GXM boards. Newer G12A/B and SM1 boards need to use the newer (and badly named) HEVC driver that supports H264, HEVC and VP9 codecs and there's an issue with 10-bit/4K media. After a multi-year wait someone is currently known to be working on a sponsored rewrite of the HEVC driver .. although I didn't see code to test yet.

LibreELEC 11.0.3 out of the box does not decode 1080p@25Hz H.265 on the Odroid C4. (It plays audio but shows a frozen image of the file selection menu.) If I turn off "Allow hardware acceleration with DRM PRIME" the result is the same. If I turn off "Allow using DRM PRIME decoder" the video is decoded but it's very jerky, not watchable. LibreELEC says "Video decoder: ff-hevc (SW)", "Pixel format: yuv420p10le", "Video stream: 1,920x1,080p, 1.78 AR, 25.000 FPS" here.

Unfortunately I think the link to this file will only work in Sweden. yt-dlp -F says it's hvc1.2.4.L123 3539kbit/s (format ID "hls-cmaf-full-3539-1").

Thanks, chewitt!

One example of 1440p@60Hz VP9 that I'd like to be able to watch (downscaled to 1080p; I use the 1440p stream since the YouTube 1080p streams have compression artifacts due to too low bitrate): RailCowGirl (downloaded using yt-dlp -f '308+251'

Given that it's a cab ride in a locomotive any stuttering is very visible and completely ruins the experience. Can the RPi4 handle it perfectly? Otherwise it's no better for me than the RPi2 I've already got.

Cool - thanks!

The "community build"? Is that different from the standard build available via the official download page? If so, where can I find it?

Hi,

I've run LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 2 for many years now, controlled with my TV remote over CEC, and it's been great! However I'm starting to collect more and more H.265 videos, and even some 1440p@60Hz H.265 and VP9 ones, so it's time for an upgrade. I assumed this would be easy now in 2023, but I am actually having a hard time:

• Raspberry Pi 4: does not support VP9 HW decode.
• Orange Pi 3 LTS: severe issues with CEC.
• Odroid C4: I actually got myself one of these, but besides the fact that my board seems to have hardware issues, I was disappointed to realise that H.265 and VP9 decoding does not work under LibreELEC (and 1080p H.264 stutters out-of-the-box), and even "bleeding edge" nightly CoreELEC-21 is using an old 4.9 linux kernel since apparently there is no manufacturer mainline support for the Amlogic chips at all. So this is going back for a refund.
• Radxa Rock 4[A+][B+] - ridiculously expensive (esp. incl. case) - also I've not even been able to find the specific models listed as supported in the download section, only the non-plus A&B variants.

Now I'm looking at Pine64 ROCK64 - but I'm having difficulty finding up-to-date info and experiences. Also, the facts that it's from 2017 and that there are no(?) EU sources makes be a bit hesitant. Does anyone have current experience running LibreELEC on the ROCK64, and if so can you tell me if it can play H.265 files flawlessly? What about 1440p@60Hz videos? What about VP9? Any other issues, like stuttering, or CEC not working?

Is there any other board that fits better given my requirements?

Thanks!