Posts by trent

  • Hardware to Run LibreELEC?

    Quote from silashack


    I think you should be a little careful of the comment you just made re Kodi

    it will crash/freeze eventually (Kodi cannot be called stable in the modern sense)

    The HARDWARE here is the issue, NOT Kodi.

    OE, LE and Kodi are all VERY stable. (staying away from nightly and dev builds)

    I am not bashing Kodi but there is nothing to be gained by exaggerating it's stability. If you use it for any length of time you will experience some crashes and freezes here and there.... we all know this and have experienced it.

    I am not saying this to bash Kodi, my point is that it will crash eventually and if we are building systems for family/friends, we need to consider the outcome of a crash. What will they do? Can they ssh in to reboot it? Probably not. Can they initiate a safe shut down? No, Pi has no power button. So probably they will pull the power cord.

    Then we need to consider that some hardware is more tolerant of sudden power loss. Raspberry Pi with very basic power regulation, booting from a low-grade TLC-flash SD card? I am afraid to say it will go corrupt pretty quickly. Then they will call you and say "hey, that Kodi box you built me....it seems to be 'broken' can you come and fix it?"

    Again, I am not saying don't do it, but if you must choose Pi for someone else then guide them through the process of setting it up rather than do it yourself and just give them a finished system.

  • Hardware to Run LibreELEC?

    Quote from Klojum

    I don't know what you are doing to a RPi box to make it crash or whatever, but I don't have those experiences. Not in the last couple of years using Raspberry Pi's, or now during the testing of the next LibreELEC alpha/beta/stable builds. Things work fine with the official addons. If you are planning to also add the 'not so legal' addons, then yes you are on your own.

    Should the bugs come from things that got altered, deleted or damaged by the user, then that's too bad. There is no real fix for stupidity. Make yourself an all-working setup on the micro sdcard, and then make a full backup of it. And if there is a problem, restore the backup.

    Your experiences are not reflective of the OPs scenario because you are technically knowledgeable and by your own admission have been using/testing Raspberry Pi for years. You also presumably re-image your SD card on a semi-regular basis which masks of a lot of the corruption problems.

    Remember that OP is not asking for a system for himself, he is asking to build it for someone else. If they cannot buy/build their own system, their technical expertise is probably not very high.

    RPi is simply not a good choice for this scenario. It is not a stable consumer-oriented product. It is very prone to SD corruption. It doesn't even have a power button. If you build one for a non-techy person, it will crash/freeze eventually (Kodi cannot be called stable in the modern sense), they won't know how to safely reboot, they'll pull power, after they do this several times the SD card will corrupt, they'll call you to come fix it. What starts as a fun favor to someone will quickly turn into a hassle...

    That's why I suggest to use something more stable, OR if you must choose R Pi, help them rather than just do everything for them and present them with a working system. This way they will learn the process to set it up and take responsibility for it's operation themselves.

    I am speaking from experience of being the 'tech guy' for family and friends. What starts as a favor soon turns into an obligation or expectation, they just expect you to come over and fix stuff. how-can-i-get-out-of-being-my-familys-tech-repair-guy-or-girl

  • Hardware to Run LibreELEC?

    Raspberry Pi is good for your own use. Not so good if you are building a system for someone else. They will constantly be bugging you to come fix it.

    If you really must choose Raspberry Pi, I would help your friend build it, rather than build it for him. That way he will learn how to image a card, stuff not to do (unsafe shutdown etc).

  • MSI Cubi N Intel N3050 any good?

    Quote from Bloksel

    I am very impressed by the image quality of this device compared to other systems I own. The only problem I have is that HDMI handshaking is not very reliable. See also my my post here LibreELEC. Do a google search and you can find a lot of people complaing about that (mostly on the Asrock forum, so it might be an Asrock thing).

    I think this is general Linux/OE/LE problem rather than specific to one hardware. I have had it 5 years ago with my old Atom/Ion HTPC and the recommendation back then was the same as now - turn on TV first to guarantee a good handshake.

  • MSI Cubi N Intel N3050 any good?

    Thanks for your input, the main thing I was worried about was video decoding performance. I am out of date with the Intel on Linux situation...when I built an OE system some years ago the Intel platforms at the time had some video glitches on OE. And also tended to have a periodic stutter with 24p.

    So it's all good, you don't run into video glitches and so forth?

  • MSI Cubi N Intel N3050 any good?

    What are peoples opinions of Intel Broadwell N3050 platforms for LibreELEC ?

    Are there any important caveats to be aware of?

    Bluray spec video decoding works okay? (H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2 @1080p)
    HEVC Main 8 @ 1080p works okay? At reasonably high bitrates? (not talking about some 1Mbps garbage)
    23.976/24p works okay ?

    Thanks

  • What remote do you use?

    Hello
    For many years I used the Hama VCR-1100 IR remote because it was responsive and worked well with OpenElec.

    From heavy use it is getting a little shabby so eventually I will replace it. I could buy the same again but I am wondering if there is something better out there nowadays.

    What dedicated remote do you use, and do you recommend it? (not including HDMI CEC or FLIRC)

    Thanks

  • SMB version

    Okay thanks I will try that and report back.

    If it doesn't work, no matter, just something I was curious about.
    [hr]
    Unfortunately that still used SMB1 protocol. No matter. I will keep an eye on the Kodi forums to see if there is any progress in this area.

    Thanks again

  • SMB version

    Quote from CvH

    could you test an windows kodi if there is smb2 ?

    Okay, I tested and it is SMB2

    Server: Win 10 Pro

    Client Kodi Protocol
    Android (4.4.2) 16.1 SMB1
    LibreELEC 16.1 SMB1
    Win 10 16.1 SMB2

    This all using default/vanilla settings, just add the shares in Kodi 'add source'.

  • SMB version

    It works but SMB1 is deprecated (planned for potential removal in subsequent releases) so I don't think it's a crazy question to ask if SMB2 is working.

    It's like asking if 802.11ac is supported and you say "is wifi working? If yes then who cares if it is b/g/n/ac"

    Anyway, I used Wireshark and determined it was operating via SMB1 only. So I guess that is my answer for now.

  • SMB version

    Quote from CvH


    I have only an Unix machine but there was smb always worse then nfs in Kodi.

    Yes, my experience same. But right now need to use SMB to narrow down a problem.

    Also SMB2 is much improved over SMB1. If SMB2 not working in Kodi , maybe that why everybody say NFS is better/faster..

  • SMB version

    Quote from CvH

    so it should have 3.6 as client = smb2

    btw I would always take NFS - at an WinServer a bit stupid ofc

    I actually share via NFS on my Windows machine (via Hanewin NFS) for long time but lately experiencing freezes/crashing on LE (and OE previously). Want to use SMB for a couple of weeks to see if my problem is related to NFS. If SMB works okay, I come back to NFS and begin bug hunting. If SMB not work okay, then my problem something deeper...

    So now that I begin to use SMB, out of curiosity I just want to check some stuff about version and performance etc.

    -----------------------

    Anyway, so if I understand correctly, connecting to a SMB share inside the Kodi interface is 100% Kodi and this is a question I should ask on Kodi forum instead?

  • SMB version

    Just to clarify, I am referring to the version of SMB protocol that LibreELEC/Kodi uses when connecting to a SMB share.

    Windows will try to use the maximum supported version when connecting to another Windows machine
    Table-SMB3-Windows-Server-2016.png

    Samba client has the capability to do this also (use the max version supported by server). Samba 3.6.25 I believe supports SMB 2 which is quite an improvement over SMB 1. (Samba added SMB3 support in 4.1)


    So my question is:
    -What is the maximum version of SMB supported by the samba client in current version LibreELEC ?
    -Does it use this max version by default when connecting to a SMB server or does it need to be configured ? (Samba changelog references a client max protocol = SMB[X] option that can be added to smb.conf )
    -Does anybody know how to verify which version of the protocol is being used for a given SMB connection? Surely it is in a logfile ?

    ----------------

    As an aside, I disabled SMB 1.0 on my Windows 10 server and LibreELEC was no longer able to access my shares. This would suggest LibreELEC only supports SMB 1.0?

    SMB 1.0 is marked as deprecated in 2014 so it seems like a good idea to ensure we can support something above this eventually.

  • SMB version

    Hi,
    I am sharing some video folders to LibreELEC via SMB shares on my Windows 10 machine.

    There are various version of the SMB protocol. As I understand it, newer versions improve performance, reduce chattiness and so forth. SMB 3.0 introduced multi-channel.

    Is there a way to find out (eg via logfile or ssh) which version of SMB is being used when LibreELEC accesses a SMB share? If so, how?

    Thanks