Posts by chewitt

video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60

^ Adding this to kernel boot params (the APPEND line in syslinux.cfg) forces the video output to the HDMI-A-1 adapter. Set this if wanting to use HDMI and not the internal screen (LVDS) or change the adapter details to suit the second HDMI device and it will be used, else the kernel will detect/use the first device probed (on a laptop, normally the LVDS connection). You can also use content like "video=HDMI-A-1:d" to disable the HDMI-A-1 device (allowing another to be discovered) .. whichever works is good. There is no F7 style hotkey to swap outputs once Kodi has started.

Run "dmesg | paste" over SSH when booted from the Q200 and Q201 device-tree files and share the URL generated.

I'm in the UK for a while, so will see if I can find a second-hand U9-H for testing .. no promises.

At the boot menu .. hit a key on the keyboard (connect a USB one if needed) and type the command "live" or "run" then hit enter. If you do nothing it defaults to "install" but this requires you to select and confirm the target USB/HDD device to install LE to. Install repartitions and formats the target device exclusively for LE use (no installing to a partition like some Generic distros do).

The main challenge will be booting the device without an SD card slot and no UART cable to show you what's actually happening in the early stages of boot when you need to trick the device into booting Linux not Android. In practice; that'll be damn complicated and I'll say "no, not possible" simply to avoid the 500 hours of blind guesswork required.

You're over-thinking the problem. Just buy the 65"+ 4K TV that makes sense for your future 4K viewing needs and budget. In 99% of 4K setups Kodi is still running the GUI at 1080p and only switches to 4K when playing 4K media so it's basically the same experience you have today except for the minor size difference between a 58" and 65" panel. The TV will still handle upscaling from 1080p to the true native 4K resolution of the panel, but it's still basically playing the same SD media at the same 1080p. In theory the 1080p pixel blocks render bigger on a 65" vs 58" so it should look worse, but since colour technology advanced by a mile since ye olden days of Plasma screens so you won't notice that; you'll only notice the colours are wildly better.

NFS has a reputation for being "lighter" which is great for low-bandwidth crap WiFi but SMB is often more resilient with dropouts and other forms of crap WiFi. There's no universal answer as WiFi is inherently a bit crap, and RPi4 WiFi is at the low-expectations end of on-board WiFi implementations so it's best to experiment and see what works best (or least-worst) for you.

If everything works briliant when you run an Ethernet cable you can join me (and the rest of staff) finger-pointing the WiFi connection

I'd suggest sharing Kodi debug logs that demonstrate the issue; timestamps should confirm the 'pause' and show what userspace was doing at the point things paused.

In the absence of a debug log that might have some error messages to comment on .. it's hard to comment.

Quote from neeto33

I'm getting 404 file not found when accessing..

It works fine here

If using the MariaDB add-on from the repo, the only thing that should need doing is configuring a username/password.

If the box boots to the kernel a drive in an "unclean" state will be detected and automatically fsck'd. If the drive doesn't get that far, the issue resides in upstream u-boot; which likely follows the Linux "stop in case you break something" approach rather than the vendor u-boot) "run

vendor code to fix things" approach. I'm not sure there's much to be done here, but the workaround would be to install HD vendor u-boot on the SD/eMMC and then boot LE using the "box" image instead of the "board" image. Then you have the benefits of very poorly written vendor code "fixing" your broken filesystem at the u-boot stage and it might continue booting.

I used to live in a house with frequent power cuts and no amount of software workarounds ever beat running essentials (things that you don't want to constantly fix or risk breaking) from a small UPS.

How was the remote connected before .. LIRC?

If the LE installer completed and system booted and on reboot the issue presents; the installer is not the issue.

Ensure things like "Secure Boot" are disabled in BIOS, we don't support that. `If the bootloader is the issue (which we don't know) you could boot from an Ubuntu LiveUSB/CD image and install grub2 as a bootloader (overwriting the default syslinux). This will then need some boot config to be defined but there are lots of examples on the internet.

If it's not the bootloader, eliminate the SSD by updating the drive firmware (should be possible with most branded drives; might need a Win box to do the update from). Installing/booting LE from USB (run mode) then attempt writing to the entire drive with "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ssd-device bs=1m" will prove the device can write to all cells. If it throws errors in dmesg .. send it back.

If it's none of the above ..

Kodi uses it's internal sqlite DB or an external MySQL/MariaDB database, and those have a fixed schema that users don't just get to change ad-hoc (Kodi code needs to change). So I don't really understand what you mean about adding links to an external DB?

RPi will be a little different from Amlogic (as the codebase is different) but improvements in performance will still be incremental not a huge leap forwards. LE12 will run all 64-bit ARM hardware with 64-bit userspace; including all binary add-ons available at the time. And nightlies are only built when there are new changes to build, and only uploaded if the build is successful, and when the server didn't fill it's disks again (none are guaranteed).

If the issue appears when the HTPC is turned on before the TV, read the wiki section on setting a static EDID file.

If the device booted as far as it did, the app that was used to create the SD card is irrelevant because the bootloader on the SD card booted and found KERNEL which runs the init script that then failed to find the SYSTEM file in the same boot partition that KERNEL resides in; ergo the partitioning itself is not the issue. The problem resides in the kernel .. and it's usually something related to mmc support.