Posts by jant90

  • IR Blaster to on and off TV

    Thanks again HiassofT I see what you mean now, after Googling I learned that the "J3Y" SMD part (visible in AliExpress images) is the transistor missing from the single LED one.

    Lastly, as you seem to be a true expert on the subject, is gpio-ir a generic module for devices other than Raspberry Pi's (it is a replacement for lirc_rpi after all)? I can not really find any official information on this module. Eventually I would like to use the GPIO header on my Khadas VIM3 with gpio-ir-tx.

  • IR Blaster to on and off TV

    Thanks HiassofT

    As far as I can tell these boards are made for Arduino projects and should work with the IRremote Arduino Library.

    No datasheets on AliExpress for sure, but some detailed pictures:

    IR Infrared Transmitter Module Ir Digital 38khz Infrared Receiver Sensor Module For Arduino Electronic Building Block|transmitter module|ir transmitterelectronic module - AliExpress

    Found the same boards here with simple datasheets as well:

    Single LED: http://https//www.emartee.com/product/42200 (datasheet: 42200.pdf)

    Dual LED: Wrobot Dual Digital 38KHz IR Transmitter Sensor - emartee.com (datasheet: 42265.pdf)

  • IR Blaster to on and off TV

    I've been looking into gpio-ir and the other modules for quite some time now and I've seen good advice from you, HiassofT , several times, so thanks for that :). Are the breakout boards in the image below the kind you're talking about? They look nice, clean and are small. Can they be hooked up directly to 5V, GND and the data pin to GPIO 18? These board can be found dirt-cheap on AliExpress for example.

         

  • Librespot addon

    Could you please share your binary so I can try it out as well?

    I tried compiling it myself as well but the build process failed. Maybe I didn't have all the required dependencies? Anyways, it would be nice if I could try your binary! :)

  • Descrambling HD channels with Tvheadend on an Amlogic S905X box

    Quote from pajtaz

    I don't know how this will work performance-wise on S905X. I have the same tuner and DVB-C that has almost all encrypted channels (Ziggo cable TV in Netherlands). I use Tvheadend with Oscam and Smartcard reader attached to USB port with smartcard from Ziggo inserted.

    However, my setup is as follows: LibreELEC on my Cubox-i4x4 but everything else (Tvheadend, Oscam, Smartcard reader) on Odroid XU4 running Debian Jessie headless server (no desktop, only command line). This works perfectly performance-wise. I am able to watch/record 4 channels at the same time, encrypted or free, using HDHomeRun network tuner.

    I have tested running Tvheadend and Oscam plus Smartcard reader and USB tuner on my Cubox before. This was not feasible. Cubox could not tune to channels, decrypt, and have smooth TV all at the same time. I didn't even attempt timeshifting or recording because Cubox could definitely not handle it.

    It is entirely possible that if you have a powerful enough of a machine that you could run everything on one machine. I chose to continue using Cubox for my LibreELEC but Odroid for PVR. I don't think the descrambling using Oscam and Smartcard reader itself uses a lot of performance. The main limitation there would be USB port speed. I think the limitation is Tvheadend tuning of channels PLUS your machine displaying live TV, all on one machine.

    Thank you, if a low power device such as the Odroid XU4 is capable of doing 4 (HD) channels (including descrambling) simultaneously then I'm hopeful my new HTPC should be capable of that as well. Oh and I'm on Ziggo as well btw :).

    I'm wondering something though: how does Tvheadend communicate with Oscam? Assuming I got my reader properly set up in Oscam, then what do I need to configure in Oscam for Tvheadend to reach and talk to Oscam? And after that, how do I configure Tvheadend so it can find my Oscam server, I have to add Oscam as my CI right but what protocol and settings do I use for that? I don't have the TV hardware yet so I can't try stuff myself yet.

    Btw, USB port speed shouldn't be an issue with the HDHomeRun right? That's only the case when you use USB tuners.

  • Descrambling HD channels with Tvheadend on an Amlogic S905X box

    Quote from puked


    This wont work if you need a card to descramble, I guess.
    If you don`t, there is no need for oscam. Oscam is only needed, if you have a CS Server running (oscam/cccam or something like that) and want to descramble on your box.

    I find tvheadend a pita to use :/ - it should work though...

    Maybe there are better options to chose from. I tried several solutions and what works best for me is a small server running windows 10 with DVBViewer Recording Service.
    Descrambling on the server. Not expensive either. I bought a used fujitsu esprimo e900 (core I3) for under 100 € from ebay, a dual tuner card with CI (DVB S2 - but there are solutions for cable, too) - all together under 200 € for the hardware - and I use this thing for all my media now. Recorded TV Shows, music, movies, series, photos, etc.

    I tried severeal linux distros with tvheadend, pvr, myth tv and whatnot... nothing worked good enough for me and/or was a serious pita to set up and use.

    Thanks for you reply, and I agree, old hardware is cheap to get by, especially those old office desktops. They perform quite well and the quality of the hardware is very decent so it will last long. However old hardware is also relatively power hungry, so what you save now you will pay back in power costs big time. Also modern techniques that would greatly improve media center capabilities aren't included (4k / HEVC decoding and such) and it's not quiet (there are moving parts and fans). Also I can only find them in 150-200€ price range btw.

    So I think I'm gonna go with the new ASRock J4205-ITX motherboard with onboard Apollo Lake CPU that is cooled passively. I'm gonna put it in a mini ITX case with external 12V adapter so it's 100% fanless, perfect for in the living room, and excluding storage it will cost me about 200€. Idle it should do around 7-8 Watts so I don't have to worry about my power bill either.

    I will run Ubuntu so I hope I'll manage setting up Tvheadend and will also add some other server software. I hope that the system is powerful enough to run all I want simultaneously (while smoothly playing back all my content in Kodi) but I can only find out through trial and error I guess.

  • Descrambling HD channels with Tvheadend on an Amlogic S905X box

    I'm wondering if descrambling encrypted channels on a Amlogic S905X box would work (performance-wise) for one or more channels simultaneously? I'm interested in buying an HDHomeRun network tuner for my DVB-C subscription (network tuner with 4 built in tuners).

    I've seen a YouTube video of a user running Tvheadend with an HDHomeRun on a S905X already so I assume the HDHomeRun drivers are good, but he showed FTA (free to air) channels only, and as I hardly have any FTA channels I would like to do descrambling as well. Also, I installed Tvheadend and OSCam (through which I should be able to descramble the channels) on the box from the LibreELEC repository and I can reach their webinterfaces just fine, only I can't test anything yet without the tuner.

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from Poida

    You haven't somehow got the 'shutdown after idle' open enabled in the power settings, have you ?

    Thanks, but that wasn't it. Shortly after that post I noticed that the box turned off when my TV turned off because of HDMI CEC.


    Quote from her

    You can change that from the GUI, in Kodi 16 it's in Settings > System > Input Devices > Peripherals > CEC Adapter then choose if and when the device powers on and off, if the device pauses or not when switching sources, etc etc. I assume the setting is still in Kodi 17.

    .

    Thanks you, totally missed that one! I was pretty sure I ran through all settings (on expert) after upgrading to Kodi 17 / LibreELEC 7.95 but that one is hidden quite well. It's actually amazing how much finetuning you can do with regards to HDMI CEC already.

    So as of now for me LibreELEC / Kodi 17 seems to run very well on my S905X (Sunvell T95M 2G), I will keep an eye on possible framedrops / choppy playback every now and then but that may have been solved by migrating my advancedsettings.xml to the new Kodi 17 format, but I will find that out over the next couple of days.

    kszaq thanks again for an amazing job!

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from jd17

    Sure...
    The way I do it might be complicated, but I don't know how else to do it since I don't have a keyboard attached/connected to the box.

    1. Download the addon "Keymap Editor"
    2. Assign whatever key you like to "CodecInfo" (/Global/Other)
    3. Go to /userdata/keymaps/
    4. Rename "codecinfo" in gen.xml to "PlayerDebug" and save.


    Great, thanks, that works. As I stream everything from a central server running Emby the PlayerDebug screen is useful to see if the stream is fast enough and how the cache is filling up. I also had to update my advancedsettings.xml manually because the variables related to caching changed and I had no idea (and apparently you have to change to manually). I will look at the PlayerDebug window when I experience framedrops again.


    Anyways I also figured out why my box is being turned off all the time, it's because apparently the box is listening to CEC events from the TV and turns off when I turn my TV off. I did read somewhere that a new CEC driver (libcec) is included in this version so perhaps that's why this behavior has changed between versions? kszaq, is there a way to prevent that from happening?

    I know they're completely different but Raspberry Pi's have the "HDMI_IGNORE_CEC_INIT" setting in their config.txt file, I guess we need something similar for Amlogic boxes so we can still use our TV remotes to control the box but don't control the box's powerstate with it. Is something like that already available perhaps? Are there HDMI-CEC config files somewhere that we can tinker with?

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from jd17

    Rename CodecInfo to PlayerDebug and you'll be able to see dropped and skipped frames.

    Could you elaborate on that please? Do I need to make a custom hotkey for that?
    [hr]

    Quote from sagacity


    Jant90, the shutdown issue sounds similar to the issue I'm having.

    Glad I'm not alone, do you see a pattern in this? I have never seen it shut down because it always happens after I haven't used it for a while (and thus it's been idling) for I would guess several hours. So I'm not sure if it gracefully shuts down or just crashes.

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    I always leave my box running 24/7 but ever since I updated to 7.95 (first beta 5 and now beta 6) I find that the box shuts down after idling a couple of hours (it didn't shutdown/crash during playback yet btw). Is that a known bug?

    Also playback stutters occasionally (something I didn't see on Kodi 16 either). It's frustrating that the codec info overlay (O button) is so limited so it's hard to know what's going on in terms of caching, refresh rate matching / av syncing and frame dropping/skipping.

    My device: Sunvell T95M

  • How to disable internal Bluetooth antenna to only use external adapter

    Yeah, I got a working solution via autostart.sh now:

    Code
    (
    sleep 5 # wait for the Bluetooth service to run at boot
    hciconfig hci1 down # disable the internal Bluetooth controller
) &


    Be sure to enable the Bluetooth service in the settings to the service runs on boot. I run it in the background because I don't want to add 5 seconds to the boot time.

    I guess this works but the downside to this approach is that disabling and enabling the Bluetooth service will cause the internal Bluetooth controller to be up again. But this can be solved by rebooting I guess.

    To identify your internal Bluetooth controller just run hciconfig and check the MAC address, then connect the external Bluetooth adapter and run hciconfig again. Then reboot your device with the external adapter connected because the order could change and hci0 and hci1 could be reversed.

  • How to disable internal Bluetooth antenna to only use external adapter

    I'm running LibreELEC on an Amlogic S905X box with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth share a chipset (rtl8723bs) and I believe they share the antenna as well. When using both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi at the same time this is causing issues (both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections drop to unworkable low bitrates). Also the Bluetooth connection is quite bad in general (streaming music is quite choppy), especially when you get a little farther away from the TV box. To fix this I got an external USB Bluetooth dongle which performs great. Music streams perfectly, even at longer distances.

    However this causes an issue as every Bluetooth device found is listed twice in LibreELEC as each Bluetooth controller is picking them up. As a result I have no way of identifying which one to connect with. Therefore I wish to disable the internal Bluetooth controller so that one won't pick up any Bluetooth devices. I tried disabling it with:
    hciconfig hci1 down
    (hci1 is the internal Bluetooth controller)

    This appears to be working fine, however this is only temporary. After a reboot or manually disabling and enabling the Bluetooth service the internal Bluetooth controller is up again.

    So basically I'm looking for a way to completely disable the internal Bluetooth controller (hci1) while keeping the Wi-Fi on the same chipset enabled. Is "hciconfig hci1 down" the best way to do this? And is there a way to make this permanent?

  • 7.0.3.011 build for S905/S905X

    When installing to an S905X device it's not necessary to replace the dtb.img, which of course is very convenient.

    However what about updating? Will the device tree be updated automatically too (with the default dtb.img file inside the img.gz)? Or should we extract the dtb.img file and add it to the update folder?

  • 7.0.3.011 build for S905/S905X

    I bought a new box (a T95m with s905x chipset, 2GB RAM) with built-in Bluetooth hoping I would be able to use it with LibreELEC but unfortunately LibreELEC reports that no Bluetooth adapter is found.

    Would it be possible to get the internal Bluetooth working with LibreELEC somehow? Like by compiling drivers or something.

    I can get Bluetooth working with an external USB dongle btw that I also used on my RPi2.

  • 7.0.3.011 build for S905/S905X

    Just this weekend I installed build 010 to SD card and it appears to be running great, thanks a lot kszaq!

    I don't want to install LibreELEC to NAND so I can still boot to Android whenever needed. So I just want to make sure I got the updating procedure right if I want to keep running it from SD card. Are these the steps?

    Code
    $ cd /storage/.update
$ wget "http://kszaq.libreelec.tv/s905/7.0.3.011/LibreELEC-S905.aarch64-7.0.3.011.img.gz"
$ wget "http://kszaq.libreelec.tv/s905/7.0.3.011/device_trees/gxbb_p200_1G_1Gbit.dtb" #(or whichever version is relevant for your particular box)
$ mv gxbb_p200_1G_1Gbit.dtb dtb.img
$ reboot


Or I could put the img.gz file and device tree file in the update folder through SAMBA and then reboot from the LibreELEC GUI for the same result I guess.

    And what is the differences between the img.gz file and the LibreELEC-S905.aarch64-7.0.3.011.zip file by the way?