Posts by chewitt

  • AML boot sequence.

    This describes the BL1 (Silicon) to BL2 (Software) boot flow: https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/boar…/boot-flow.html

    Once you get to BL2, what happens depends on what the software implements. Amlogic hacked in various recovery mechanisms to support common things that Android STB manufacturers want (and we abuse those to make the box run Linux). However those OEM box manufacturers sometimes tweak the code to suit their own purposes, or simply because they can, or because their developers were simply incompetent with strange ideas. As a result, while the general flow probably follows some common themes, there are enough exceptions seen "in the wild" that you shouldn't assume anything until you see UART logs and/or a dump of the u-boot env configuration.

    If vendor u-boot is on eMMC in 99.999% of boxes it will be used. The contents of the u-boot environment (env) will then dictate what happens next. If the env has been modified through boot.scr or s905_autoscript methods it will look for Linux boot files (as dictated by what the boot scripts set) and this remains configured unless a reset is performed (restoring the original env for Android-only boot) or the recovery mode is triggered again; causing it to look for boot.scr or s905_autoscript which can (re)modify the env again.

    Your box has an env modified by CE boot scripts to look-for and use CE boot files. Unless you trigger recovery again and tell it to use LE boot files; it continues to look for CE files and fails to find them as CE and LE boot media are (intentionally) different and since the kernels are now also rather different, the boot params may or may not be aligned.

    Users frequently assume u-boot scripts are read on every boot and this is not true. Users also assume they can rename files and make it all work, and this is not completely true. Users also very-very-wrongly assume that I have any interest in CE or interest in triaging frankenbox configurations. Sorry to dissapoint..

  • Downgrade LibreELEC

    You will need to enable hidden files and folders support before /storage/.update will be visible in the Kodi file manager. It's normally much easier to SSH into the box to run commands to copy files around, and if that sounds like rocket science, it's the kind of science that would be useful to learn; as much as we aim for a GUI experience if you want to start doing downgrades and backups it quickly turns into essential knowledge.

  • Noob type help request TVHeadend and Youtube.

    I'd recommend using using TVH 4.3 as 4.2 is effectively a dead codebase (no more fixes/changes will be made) and 4.2 is not upgradeable to 4.3 (and 4.4 in the mid-term future, at which point 4.2 will finally lose the 'stable' tag).

    Tvheadend documentation is rather lacking .. in the project's to-do list, but it's a long list and there's some bigger items to fix before we get around to that whole heap of fun.

    petediscrete or DeltaMikeCharlie .. any ideas?

    p.s. There's also the Tvheadend forum: https://tvheadend.org

  • Rpi4 freeze when watching twitch (pretty sure at midroll ad)

    Add-on issues are rarely OS specific but you could prove that by testing the add-on under Kodi on RaspiOS instead of LE. If the issue exists there too you can focus on the Twitch add-on and log issues with the add-on devs via the support thread in the Kodi forums.

    I'd also suggest using LE12 to see if anything is different. Development for LE and Kodi has been focussed on Kodi Omega for a while now and even if there's a bug found, the fix will go into LE12/Omega first.

  • RPi5 with three TV tuners

    If you see anything like "needs the official PSU" written in documentation this is simply meaning "needs a PSU with the capabilities of the official PSU" as there is 100% no hardcoded requirement or secret handshaking to check whether the user has an official RPi branded PSU. RPi != Apple :)

  • How to access .kodi folder

    The /storage/.kodi/userdata folder where most thing you might need to access is shared as //LIBREELEC/Userdata, but the Kodi root folder in /storage/.kodi is not shared by default. If you want to change that for some reason, you need to access //LIBREELEC/Config and edit the samba.conf.sample file to add a new share (crib the format from existing entries) then rename the file to samba.conf and reboot. On restart the new config will be used instead of the default one and the extra share you added will be accessible on the network. Or use an SFTP client like Filezilla/CuteFTP which can see all files and directories on /storage easily instead of SMB.

    NB: Enabling hidden files/folders in Kodi settings does not help with remote access to the local Samba shares.

  • Virtualbox to create "master" image for multiple burns?

    Quote from justnowsigningup

    I'm trying to get LE to run in Virtualbox so that I can do all my configuration, add-on installation and setup, etc., then convert the .vdi to an iso that I can then plop onto the few raspberry pis I have running LE. Is this even possible?

    You can probably run or directly import the Generic OVA image we don't support (but is available) for vmware into VirtualBox; staff are mostly using vmware but there are other people who use VB. That will avoid the need to create an ISO version of our installer .img which likely won't work anyway due to all the paths being wrong. NB: You could create an installer USB as-normal and then boot the VM from that to install to the internal VM disk (as normal) .. would be much easier.

    However the VB setup is x86_64 and your RPi2/3 boards are armv8 so even if you abandon the idea of "converting the image to use on an RPi" (which is technically not possible due to different CPU architectures) and do a simple "backup /storage and restore /storage" you will still find that there are config differences due to Intel and RPi hardware being different, and binary add-ons that you backed-up will not be compatible (due to wrong CPU arch again).

    In the end the amount of effort/energy expended trying to do this "the clever way" will be far greater than just setting up a couple of RPi boards the un-clever/normal way. Set-up one board and then learn to "scp" the important bits of /storage/.kodi to the others and you can replicate the config in 10mins per-board.

  • Recommendation for the next av receiver

    I'm running a Marantz SR7011 since 2018 (was discounted as old stock when something new came out) and when that finally dies of old age sometime in the next decade I'll do the same again; find something Marantz in the upper mid-range of their lineup from the previous 18-months which had a great rating and is now on-sale somewhere. These days I'm only using 5.1 output (else there's too much cable everywhere) and I use PCM output in Kodi to avoid needing two remote controls. Perhaps it's old(er) age but these days I'm content to have something that sounds good (with Kef Reference speakers) that "just works" instead of pushing the boundaries of Linux media; or perhaps the boundaries (and an RPi5) just caught up with what I'm happy with and need?

    RPi5 has greatly improved CPU decode capabilities over an RPi4 so it can e.g. handle some AV1/VP9 content, but otherwise doesn't really add anything over an RPi4, e.g. HEVC capabilities are identical.

    HDR10+ is typically backwards compatible to HDR10 so you'll see "HDR" output on that content. DV content is sometimes backwards compatible with standard HDR and othertimes requires hardware with dedicated DV capabilities; which limits you to devices that run Android or Windows and are outside the scope of this forum.

  • Odroid C2: kernel panic "Failed to execute /init (error -2)" when trying to load custom EDID

    I created ^ that some time ago to replicate the "edid-create" process for other boards (which never seemed to quite work) but it's not something that I was able to test easily so it hasn't been upstreamed.

    Copy to /storage, make it executable, then run "./script.sh create" and see what happens.

  • Grub help

    There is no ISO image and LE cannot run from an ISO image (so you can stop looking for one). If you want to install to spare space on an existing disk this can be done, but it's not a supported configuration so you won't find nice HOWTO guides and instructions for setting something up. Grub will work fine (we don't care what bootloader is used) if you configure the boot entry correctly; see contents of syslinux.cfg for ideas. LE requires two partitions; one for boot files (512MB) and one for persistant storage (8-16GB min) assuming media is stored somewhere else.