Posts by chewitt

  • Installing on old S905 TV box

    There are hundreds of manufacturers of boxes branded "MXQ" so that's not going to enlighten us on WiFi specs. And lshw only shows the items that we described in device-tree so that doesn't help either. Things that would help are high-res pics of the board inside the box so we can see the chips being used, and the boot log (dmesg) from the original vendor kernel.

  • Installing on old S905 TV box

    Anything that starts with "meson-gxbb" is a candidate. No value in trying others (won't work). As for WiFi, please share the Brand/Model of the box (hoping it's not something super-generic) and the URL from "pastekodi" so I can see what state things are in. If you have pics of the board inside it can help with chip guessing.

  • ArchLinux package for LibreElec-USB-SD-Creator

    You don't need to execute the app as root, but Linux ultimately requires that privilege to reimage the target device so once you reach the point of writing the app must prompt for (sudo) rights. Users with a Linux desktop OS tend to be more technical in nature and thus less fazed with using dd or the need for root privs (which are unavoidable) and it's similar to a lesser extend with macOS. The goal of the tool has always been to simplify the process of acquiring and writing the latest version, and we'd prefer to make the current tool work than have different tools for different OS (consistency is good for users).

    Unfortunately shared Qt builds are simple. Static is something else :)

  • Does LE support BBR?

    BBR is not set in the 6.1 kernel either. To enable support and make an image for testing you will need to self-build an image.

    See: https://wiki.libreelec.tv/development/build-basics

    If you feel the distro defaults should be changed, you'll need to send a pull-request to our main GitHub repo with the required changes and a detailed explanation for why we need to change things. We're not adverse to changing defaults when there's a good reason, but you will need to impart and if necessary educate people on use-cases for/against and why the change is a good reason.

  • How to enable GuC for N5105?

    Code
    echo "options i915 enable_fbc=1 enable_guc=3" > /storage/.config/modprobe.d/i915.conf
reboot

    That ^ will create a modprobe conf file with that content and reboot the system. The contents of /storage/.config/modprobe.d/ are overlaid onto /etc/modprobe.d during system start.

  • OpenVPN Server help

    SSH can run on multiple ports at the same time so the 'safe' way to experiment is to configure the additional port first (leaving 22 active) and then restart the service. If you can now connect on the new port, you can make an additional change to remove port 22.

  • Installing on old S905 TV box

    The right firmware should already be in the image so you can delete that file.

    On eMMC: Amlogic invented their own partition scheme which is only used and understood by their own legacy kernels and tools so upstream Linux and utils used for partitioning and formatting in modern LE cannot can see any valid partitions on the eMMC device. Any attempt to repartition the device with tools that don't know about the special scheme will break the device-specific u-boot that is booting the box.

    If you have the original vendor u-boot sources for the specific box it's possible to extract things and make custom images, but these days nobody still has the sources for boxes made in 2015 so that option is almost always a non-starter. The technical challenge is that the process of signing u-boot with Amlogic magic uses files with box/device specific RAM timings so generic support for e.g. p200/p201 doesn't exist. We have the signing sources for the original p201 reference board; but there is zero guarantee your p201 derived box uses the exact same RAM chips as the Amlogic reference board (more likely you can guarantee it doesn't) and if the RAM timings are wrong you've "bricked" the box and now have a complicated process to recover it to a usable state (most users baulk at the idea of opening the box and shorting pins to disable eMMC and thus force boot from SD/USB) and that also assumes you have a working u-boot binary (and you probably don't).

    So we don't support internal installs unless the sources do exist, i.e. the WeTek boxes and a couple of SBC boards. NB: From my own testing the real-world difference between a modern SD card and most eMMC chips in boxes of this era is marginal.

  • Installing on old S905 TV box

    Code
    Jan 01 00:00:10 pain kernel: usb 1-1: ath9k_htc: Firmware ath9k_htc/htc_9271-1.4.0.fw requested
Jan 01 00:00:10 pain kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver ath9k_htc
Jan 01 00:00:11 pain kernel: usb 1-1: ath9k_htc: Transferred FW: ath9k_htc/htc_9271-1.4.0.fw, size: 51008
Jan 01 00:00:12 pain kernel: usb 1-1: Service connection timeout for: 257
Jan 01 00:00:12 pain kernel: ath9k_htc 1-1:1.0: ath9k_htc: Unable to initialize HTC services
Jan 01 00:00:12 pain kernel: ath9k_htc: Failed to initialize the device
Jan 01 00:00:12 pain kernel: usb 1-1: ath9k_htc: USB layer deinitialized

    ^ The kernel supports the driver and we already include the correct firmware (listed in the driver code) so the device is probed, but fails to load the firmware. I've Googled the error and it doesn't show up much (no clues, and nothing current).

    I'd suggest experimenting with other device trees. GXBB boxes deviate more from reference designs than newer S905X/D and S912 do.

  • TVHeadend - Poor perfomance - Wetek Play 2 - LibreElec 11 Beta 1

    RPi4 is excelently supported, but DVB is an icky topic regardless of hardware. The general recommendation is to separate tuners from the playback device so you can run whatever OS and hacked version of drivers and firmware that works reliably .. with playback on something simple that you can OS bump whenever LE puts out a new release. The moment you put both functions on the same device you can have a reliable player or DVB that works; they are generally mutually exclusive and you have to chose one.

    That means you could revert to a legacy image, e.g. CE or dtech's LE 9.2.8 one for the TVH side. RPi4 is a nice playback device if you can get your hands on one.

  • TVHeadend - Poor perfomance - Wetek Play 2 - LibreElec 11 Beta 1

    There is no hardware deinterlace in any codec, forcing software deinterlace which is limited (else you hit the CPU limits). I've disabled support for MPEG2/MPEG4 hardware decoding in the latest images (as the hardware decoder is broken) which is why those 'work' now. However, ff those codecs and interlacing are important for your media; you aren't in the narrow band of users who should be using the AMLGX image. I have low expectations on progress because it's basically me solo supporting Amlogic these days, and I don't write driver code.

  • Minix U9-H freeze on kodi loading page / black screen

    Code
    touch /storage/.cache/services/sshd.conf
systemctl start sshd
connmanctl
agent on
services
connect <service_string>
(enter pw when prompted)

    Running ^ that sequence of commands form the textmode console should enable SSH, start it, then connect you to a WiFi network instead of Ethernet, although from logs it appears SSH is running (as it was forced) and the Ethernet NIC is up/active and assigned 192.2168.1.76. Make sure that you're using a current version of PuTTY as support for ciphers does change over time.

    Then, to have more info on why Kodi isn't working, create /storage/.kodi/userdata/advancedsettings.xml with the following content (to put Kodi into debug mode) then reboot and run "pastekodi" and share the URL:

    XML
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<advancedsettings version="1.0">
  <!-- enable debug logging -->
  <loglevel hide="false">1</loglevel>
</advancedsettings>

    Then maybe we get some insights on the problem..

  • Installing on old S905 TV box

    If you add "textmode" to boot params in uEnv.ini the box boots to a text console instead of Kodi and you can attach/use a USB keyboard to run commands. To retrieve the logs, make the SD card read-write with "mount -o remount,fw /flash" and then dump the boot log content to /flash with "journalctl > /flash/journal.log" .. then connect the SD back to something you can retrieve and pastebin the log file from.

    AFAIK all the atheros USB chips are enabled in the kernel but we are probably missing the firmware, which should be obvious if you look in dmesg for the chip being probed. This might get it working: "mkdir -p /storage/.config/firmware && cd /storage/.config/firmware && wget https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/…plain/ar9271.fw && reboot"

  • My Old Minix Neo U9-H Can Be Updated?

    There is no driver code in-common between the Legacy image and AMLGX image so there is no value in making comparisons. It's like pointing at a Nissan car and a Ford car and saying .. "they're different" .. because they are.

    I'll add the investigation to my list, but these days Amlogic support is largely a one-man team (and I don't write driver code) so these things take time.