Posts by chewitt

  • MariaDB add-on, Docker containers - is it safe to backup while running?

    I worked in IT for 25+ years. I would make zero assumptions that any developer expected their code to run in a container on a cheap ARM board device and considered how that might affect transactional integrity in backups. That said, the rate of change in MariaDB from Kodi use is probably low enough that you will get away with our backup process. The best thing to do with backups is a) take them regularly, b) store them off the device that can go wrong, c) prove you can restore them too (not all the time, but occasionally).

  • Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

    Quote from gertler

    So does LIbreElec work now with the zero 2 w?

    LE11 nightly images will boot/run on the board, but will probably deliver a weak Kodi experience for two reasons. First, 512MB RAM just isn't really enough for Kodi 20 and a good overall experience and we see the same on other 512MB systems which is why the project has chosen to drop official support for all hardware with under 1GB RAM. Second, the newer RPi codebase no longer supports all the "clever but hacky" optimising done to OMX/MMAL in the past (these no longer exist in Kodi) so HEVC will be a problem. The simple reason there are deliberately no official LE 9.2.x images for the Zero2 is: we didin't want to add support for something in LE9.2 that we already dropped support for in the next release (LE10). TL/DR: You can boot LE11 but don't expect it to be great and when it isn't, don't expect support.

  • LibreELEC on Firestick?

    Zero2W is an awkward one for people. As it's 512MB it really needs the older LE codebase which is lighter on lower spec hardware, but at the same time it launched after we've stopped all work/effort on that codebase. It's not particularly hard to add support for it (although users in that forum thread seem to have done things the hard way) but we deliberately chose not to spin an official image with support; because we already decided to drop support for <1GB devices in LE10+ .. so we don't want add support and encourage people to purchase Zero2W boards when we effectively already discontinued support for them. It's not a bad board, but people have high expectations and it's still low-spec so we have to be sensible about the amount of work we create for ourselves.

  • Clone to a (slightly) smaller disk for RPi4

    Cloning requries you to duplicate the entire filesystem, and filesystems have all kinds of checks and such to detect corruption; hence when the size of source and target aren't the same it all goes wrong. Instead make a backup and then restore it to the target; this way you are working only with the content of the filesystem and not the entire disk. The content of the filesystem is a lot smaller, more manageable and thus the process is also quicker.

    TL/DR; learn how to use tar .. make a backup, then restore the backup. LE settings has this capability built-in, although it only grabs specific folders (/storage/.kodi, /storage/.cache, /storage/.config) not all folders.

  • LibreELEC on Firestick?

    It seems you love unsupported low-spec hardware. Note that LE 9.2.6 (or 9.2.8) will not run on a Zero2W because it was launched some time after we released the last LE 9.2.x image so the image doesn't include the required firmware and other boot bits. In theory it can run LE11 images (nightlies) but it will probably run rather 'meh' due to low RAM on that model; we decided to officially not support anything with less than 1GB starting with LE10 to avoid those kinds of support issues (sound familiar?). That guidance is documented in release notes for LE10 and such (that we write and nobody reads). There is also a thread around here with some people flailing around the process of trying to backport Zero2W support to the older codebase, but I stopped reading that thread after a while as it made my head hurt.

  • Control picture settings like brightness, hue, speed, etc. possible?

    Kodi does not support fade in/out itself, but you could pre-process the video content to include those steps to effect nice transitions between videos in a playlist. I'd assume content used for advertising or kiosk type use-cases? will be pre-processed to ensure everything is correctly encoded for nice output anyway, so I'd build that book-ending step into my encoding pipeline. See https://donaldfeury.xyz/add-fade-in-an…ts-with-ffmpeg/ for one approach.

    Kodi supports play/pause/stop and management of what's playing (or playlists) through APIs. It also has controls for speed, but you probably don't want to mess with speed for good output (again, if you do, do it during encoding). There are no controls for Hue and Brightness in Kodi (or at OS level in LE) - in our opinion (and what's been coded for) those belong to the TV not the player software.

    LE/Kodi support basic kiosk/advertising type use-cases, but to do something more professional you probably want to develop a custom Skin that avoids OSD pop-ups during transitions and might need to make code changes to add features, and all the code is open-source to help with that kind of thing. NB: LE does not take on 'paid' projects, we're not resourced for that kind of thing. Kodi is much the same although some of their team are independent developers in their day-jobs and might consider paid work; but there is no formal channel to ask for a quote so you'd need to post in their forum and hope someone 'bites' on the opportunity (it's never guraranteed).

  • Official LE11 Test Images for Amlogic (Kodi-20)

    Quote from Loader009

    Can you build in some kind of feature, to use 24Hz in case of a 23.976 fps file?
    Atm it switches to 60Hz, which is uncomfortable.

    I also looked if I can force 10bit output (s905x) - sadly I found nothing.

    Is it a feature missing in kodi or lima?

    Kodi supports refresh rate bounding/override via advancedsettings.xml; you can define min/max boundaries and what refresh should be picked so you could define 23-24 and force 24Hz instead of using 3:2 pulldown and/or 60Hz.

    GXL (S905X) hardware supports 10-bit decoding so you can play 10-bit media, but the SoC internally downmixes to 8-bit HDMI output so it's a hardware restriction and the AVR/TV will always show 8-bit output. GXM (S912) was the first Amlogic SoC to support 10-bit output.

  • LibreELEC on Firestick?

    If it was as easy as installing an RPi board I'd show interest. However while it can technically be done, it's not simple, so precisely because "it could be a big thing" is why I'd run for the hills before supporting it .. because endlessly walking people through some fiddly install process on a piece of cheap hardware is not fun. Kodi runs well under Android on Firesticks "as designed" so we'll stick to that.

  • no sound on ripped DVD

    The original has 6x Channel AC3 audio while the rerip has 2x Channel AAC. Not all AVRs/TVs support AC3 audio tracks, so my hunch is that you have that enabled in Kodi pass-through settings and a receiving device that doesn't support it - hence when you swap audio tracks (that are not AC3) they play, and when you play other content (which is not AC3) it plays, and the rerips (which are not AC3) play. If you disable Kodi AC3 support those tracks will be remixed to multi-channel PCM for output.

  • How to setup a bridge from Wi-fi to Ethernet?

    Then connman tethering is not the solution you are seeking, because it shares the Ethernet connection behind NAT and has deiberately has zero config options beyond SSID/Passphrase. If you want a proper bridge either learn how to create that at kernel level or buy a WiFi bridge device. I use some older Apple Airport Express devices for testing when I want to avoid the need for WiFi drivers; they are obsolete and thus rather cheap to find on eBay (the last one I grabbed was $12).

  • How to change swapfile size on LibreELEC?

    Quote from tontolo

    I want to try to create an external swap because randomly the system freezes and reboots by itself, the probable symptom is that the RAM memory is full. Trying the free command I see that about 100MB is left available and I think this is causing the random reboots

    If the system randomly freezes something like power or disk corruption or an actual code bug are more likely causes. The kernel will actively manage RAM use and if there is ever an Out Of Memory (OOM) scenario the kernel oom-killer function will proactively kill idl/active processes to free space. If that happens it's fairly obvious from logs.

    Users are forever seeking some magic cure for "my cheap board doesn't have enough RAM" and the ONLY solution to that problem is buying a less cheap board with more actual RAM. Swap and Zram and such can fake more; but at the cost of reduced I/O performance and high wear on the SD cards that most LE systems run from and/or reduced CPU performance (due to compression) on an already low-end device.

    NB: RPi Zero was on the edge of acceptable performance with the older RPi codebase (LE 9.x) which uses highly optimised media drivers. The newer standards-based codebase (LE10/LE11) is in our opinion too heavy for acceptable performance on 512MB devices which is why we have formally dropped support for all boards/devices with 512MB.