Posts by cosmos

I see. Thank you for taking the time to provide your insights on the platform. I've been happy with it for a lot of years, thanks God for all the work provided by the LE project. It is what it is I guess 🙂

My C2 board has been given a significant extension of time with the AMLGX driver provided by your team. THANK YOU! H.264 material plays almost perfectly, very rarely do I manage to freeze playback by doing a lot of forward/backward seeks. H.265 seeking though is problematic "maybe 7 out of 10", as described in the Amlogic AMLGX build release notes. Unfortunately, I can't even attain that seven (unless of course YMMV holds; my C2 is inferior to other AMLGX-suitable SBCs out there): either seeking, or switching audio channel (lots of anime watching with my son) makes the video freeze (in seldom case have Kodi restarts) in 90% of the time.

Usually I just press stop and play again. Keeping fingers crossed that it will be able to play after seeking to the point I was watching.

Add to the seek problems a lot of artifacting I do not see on a pal's RPi4 LE11 or on my own LE11 pc-based build, but that exists on specific anime releases (usually 1080p 10bit ones), especially when there is camera panning.

Do you know any devs had time/interest to look into these issues, in order to improve things on the upcoming LE12?

Quote from Da Flex

Check this: When your LE box is off, go to TV's sound menu, and set "SPDIF Selection" to "Auto".

Problem is that under the tv sound options, Audio Preference and SPDIF appear solely when viewing tv and not when switched to HDMI #1. Upon closer inspection, in the manual ( https://www.manua.ls/panasonic/tx-p50ut50e/manual?p=41 ) it is stated that:

Quote

(with regard to the DIGITAL AUDIO OUT and HDMI2 (ARC function) terminals

[...]

* For DVB mode or video contents of Media Player / Network services

...

Which prolly means I'm screwed here No way to send DD from an HDMI source to optical. Probably Panasonic understood its bummer and evolved this functionality in more recent tv sets (as yours, I presume)...

VLouis thanks mate, yes I am aware of the steps needed. Cost was off-setting me TBH, and the solution proposed by petediscrete would definitely be preferable. Will continue looking for a USB-to-Toslink 5.1 solution.

If only I could get rid of my Yamaha and B&W speakers, I'd go for an HDMI soundbar and get done with it

Quote from ctktv

Shell session

[...]
ln -s /storage/.config/firmware/edid/monitor_edid.bin tv_edid.bin
ln -s /storage/.config/firmware/edid/projo_edid.bin lcd_edid.bin

Apologies for hijacking this thread a bit, but I had to ask: why do you symlink in the last two lines? Perhaps this is related to my odroid C2 issue in Odroid C2 on 11.0.1: switching tv to 24fps?

chewitt do you know if the intel-related instructions for EDID regarding LE 11.0.1 are actually applicable on C2? Just wondering since I do believe I've followed them correctly but ending with a kernel panic...

Apologies for that, I've already wasted a lot of your time with this one but it feels I'm almost there...

EDIT: There's a minor correction btw in the part regarding HDMI-A-2 and specifically how the line should look after appending sys/extlinux.conf. It's missing the initrd=/edid.cpio part.

Coming to my own issue, could the fact that extlinux.conf is not in /flash but in /flash/extlinux/extlinux.conf create the panic? I don't think so, since edid.cpio in specified to be in the root during boot (the /flash dir perhaps) and the drm.edid_firmware is possibly a reference to the overlayed firmware dir, but just saying.

That's correct. Specifically, it shows up as ALSA device HDA Intel PCH, MEI Panasonic-TV on HDMI #0. I'm using the same device as the passthrough device as well. I'm posting my audio setup (sorry if it's all Greek to you ).

With the posted settings I get audio only on 2.0 sources (IIRC). Furthermore, with passthrough enabled in Kodi and with multichannel sources, when I press "O" to show playback information it shows that the source audio is "RAW, RAW, RAW..." etc, instead of "FL, FR, ..."

No pong from this side We have packet loss mon capitan!

Nothing there yet and nothing in spam as well, can do a reply here?

Well the subject days it all. My email contains a plus sign, used on Gmail for mail aliasing and that might be the culprit. Many sites consider this an illegal character for email mailboxes, but it is an allowed character.

It's already set to digital Perhaps you have a much newer Panasonic model and that does the trick.

Quote from Da Flex

I also have a Panasonic Plasma, just with TOSLINK instead of electrical S/PDIF. Works fine with my DD / DTS AVR. So I pretty much have the same setup like you. I go RPi HDMI -> TV and TV TOSLINK -> AVR. That should also work for S/PDIF.

Don't bash me please, but isn't S/PDIF the same with TOSLINK?

Indeed this is a TOSLINK (optical) interface and not a coaxial. My tv model is (again IIRC) TX-P50UT50E, dated 2012ish or something.

Connection of my Dell to the TV is made over the non-ARC HDMI. And from TV over toslink to the Yamaha A2.

In your setup are you able to pass-through DD 5.1 data from the RPi to the TV and then to the amp? Whenever I try that I don't get any sound at all on the other end.

AFAIK RPi does nothing special compared to a pc, apart from doing CEC and stuff (which should not be relevant in this case at all). What sort of debugging from SSH could I do to check things up? I really hope that having a similar TV/setup you might be able to help me out.

In the meantime I was looking solutions from aliexpress like these one, but don't know if they do the trick:

* https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32955530378.html

* https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000244824209.html

<off topic>Who should I contact to check why I do not get email notifications on thread answers (even though the relevant option is enabled)? </off topic>

Quote from Da Flex

Seems like your Panasonic S/PDIF can only deliver stereo. So get an HDMI audio splitter with TOSLINK. It's not too expansive.

Digging around in the tv documentation and making a few tests seems to indicate that the tv s/pdif can also send DD multichannel, albeit from TV stations only (and not from HDMI inputs)

For the record, I did find an oooold addon that did conversion to analog Dolby ProLogic. Unfortunately it's a no go for recent Kodi versions. Would be nice to test though.

As for HDMI splitters: they are tried and tested but IIRC when using them with RPi's there were some issues with the correct transfer of EDID information.

Quote from petediscrete

Something like this would probably fit the bill https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cubilux-TOSLIN…600288957&psc=1

That's awesome, especially since it seemed it worked fine on Linux, considering the comments! Pity it's not available for purchase Could you provide any alternatives to that. I live in Greece, so everything from amazon.de (.fr/.it/.es) could be purchased easily.

Funny thing is that I've been searching and searching in aliexpress for example and could not find anything (apart from expensive DACs and HDMI splitters).

Apologies for the somewhat cryptic title. I have a notoriously old setup with a 10 year tv and a beasty 25-year old (!) Yamaha A2 amplifier. Up to some days ago, my needs in the living room were served by a (also old) AMD-based pc that was equipped with an optical output. Setup worked like a charm: video was sent to the Panasonic 50" plasma over HDMI and LE was configured to transcode anything multichannel to 5.1 DD (amp also is 5.1 DTS capable).

The rig went dead and was replaced with a rather cheap Dell optiplex 3050 ultra small form factor thingie, lovable to watch I migrated my LE setup to the new box and everything works perfectly (plus having a UEFI boot).

Problem is that it lacks an optical digital out. Luckily the Panasonic behemoth comes with an S/PDIF out which, at least, makes sure that I can get excellent audio ... albeit in stereo.

Now I'm certain that it is not doable, but have to ask: is there some sort of "magic" that can be used to send multichannel audio to the TV and have the TV just pass the audio to the amp. From what I've tested this does not work. Still, I'm asking just in case it can be made with some sort of tinkering.

For what this is worth, I'm looking into workaround. So far:

* buy some sort of HDMI splitter boxes that take HDMI and output both HDMI and S/PDIF: work but a bit pricey

* was looking into whether small form factor PCI cards with S/PDIF exist, until I found out that the Dell has no room for cards at all

* currently checking whether I can get a USB card that also has S/PDIF without spending a fortune

* will look whether there's some sort of Dolby ProLogic transcoder for Kodi exists: if it does I'll simply transcode everything multichannel to the special stereo signal for ProLogic.

Please free to suggest any inexpensive solutions (if any)

Quote from chewitt

https://wiki.libreelec.tv/configuration/…ration-advanced has instructions (also needing update) on capturing and creating a custom IR config. The bit that needs updating is that the config file format has changed to "toml" .. but if you look at the wiki instructions and compare to the toml files in /usr/lib/udev/rc_keymaps/ the new format is pretty simple to crib.

Mission accomplished on this part just by doing an ir command and creating a one-liner file that referred to an existing rc-6 MCE remote! Thanks Chewitt

I still can't figure out what produces the kernel panic. It still displays beautifully but being a limited device without active cooling it would be nice to lower its load by avoiding doing 24 to 60fps conversions.

For the record the error at boot is:

Failed to execute /init (error -2)

Kernel panic - not syncing: No working init found. Try passing init= option to kernel...

Tried your own EDID just to be certain mine was not at fault.

Quote from chewitt

https://wiki.libreelec.tv/configuration/edid has instructions on configuring an edid.bin file so Kodi sees the TV as always connected. The wiki needs updating to reflect that the Intel instructions apply to all devices using the kernel DRM architecture; including Amlogic (and Allwinner, Rockchip) boards.

Thank you for your edid file, and for your extremely descriptive answer!! Truth is I found a copy in an old backup of mine which I believe is the hacked edid file (was named edid.dat but I think it's the same as a .bin)!

I've followed the instructions but ran into a kernel panic at boot. Looking closer at the (intel) instructions, perhaps there's some minor mistake or the odroid build is a bit different: for example, extlinux.conf actually resides in a subdirectory as /flash/extlinux/extlinux.conf. Not sure if this is an issue. However, and if I understand my Linuxes right, command mv ../edid.cpio /flash/ would leave edid.cpio residing in /flash. The subsequent APPEND to extlinux.conf states that the following should be appended:

initrd=/edid.cpio drm.edid_firmware=edid/edid.bin video=HDMI-A-1:D

Not an expert here, but:

1) should perhaps edid.cpio be at the root directory instead of /flash ?

2) option drm.edid_firmware is looking for an edid directory, is that correct?

3) finally (ok this might be an absolutely stupid question here), there's a smiley at the end of the above mentioned line, is that correct?

I'll get the SD card to mount the vfat partition and play a bit with extlinux.conf to fix things.

As for the remote option: I've been bashing my head REAL hard to find where the heck I have had some sort of configuration of the remote. I have a backup as well as the entire previous SD-based coreelec installation, but there is no file under /storage/.config/rc_keymaps

EDIT: <off topic> For some reason I'm not getting new post notifications, even though I've enabled them. Just a FYI </off topic>

Thanks for taking the time to look into this mate, really appreciate it.

pastekodi -> http://ix.io/4sRT

modetest | paste -> http://ix.io/4sRW

This Samsung tv is ooooold. But has been happily playing 24p material from my (back at the time) PS3 as well as from other sources. Worked perfectly with my old RPi when switched to 24 (using some sort of EDID hack I don't recall, but would happily look into).

On the topic of this jump from coreelec, and OT to this thread, I can't recall how I made a old Creative IR remote work with the C2. I do have a custom remote.xml file over the years, but it does not respond to it so I've installed a keyboard/mouse in the meantime.

Just love the way your work and the LibreELEC team's in general keeps alive these monoliths of hardware

Really glad I'm now using the latest LE image with all the bells and whistles of up-to-date code here

I do have one question though: back in the day, Kodi could (IIRC) auto-switch the display actual refresh rate to "match" the material one. So on a 60Hz tv, when playing 24Hz material, Kodi would switch to 24Hz as well.

Now my old Samsung can definitely play 24Hz material. When doing an OSD display of a23.976 movie and enabling the OSD information display, the system tab shows that the system rendering speed is playing around the refresh rate I've set to the Kodi playback options (60Hz in this case).

I think I used some kind of utility or a hack to hard-insert a 1080@24 refresh rate to my libreelec/coreelec install and that worked. If someone can provide a link / howto, I'd be more than grateful.

EDIT: Search does wonders: Odroid C2, auto rate switching and 24p-defying TV

Quote from cosmos

EDIT: Search does wonders: Odroid C2, auto rate switching and 24p-defying TV

Nope, that doesn't do it. There is no /sys/class/amhdmitx/amhdmitx0/disp_cap to be found...