Posts by chewitt

Users waste an inordinate amount of time fretting about this or that tool for creating the SD card; and in 99.999999% of cases it's irrelevant to LE use because unlike other distros where it might have influence; we aren't converting a bootable ISO into a bootable USB, we are using an image explicitly designed for SD card boot.

The one thing that can sometimes influence boot and/or help with triaging boot issues is using a really old SD card; one that doesn't support fancy high-speed modes that might not always be supported well or require higher stability on the mmc bus.

ffmpeg[0x2a3c318]:   Stream #0:0: Video: h264 (High 10), yuv420p10le(tv, bt709, progressive), 1920x1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 23.98 fps, 23.98 tbr, 1k tbn, 47.95 tbc

There is no broadcast standard for 10-bit H264 (yuv420p10le) media so almost nothing supports hardware decoding of that format, including RPi4. The file will be software decoded by ffmpeg and that might be a challenge. Traditionally Animé fans have used higher spec Intel kit for their collections; there is still zero hardware decode support on the GPU but the CPU has more grunt for the task. I'd suggest experimenting with transcoding 10-bit H264 files to HEVC. The transcode will be slow, but it's a one-time task and can be scripted easily.

boot=LABEL=LIBREELEC disk=LABEL=STORAGE

^ see if changing from UUID to LABEL works in extlinux.conf

As a general rule whitelist all 3840 4K modes that are visible (ignore 4096 4K) and 1080p @ 60/59.94/50/24/23.98 (23.976). Enable refresh-rate doubling (so 25 runs at 50) and enable adjust refresh. Kodi switches the TV to the native resolution and refresh rate for the media playing and does not adapt playback to 1080p @ 60 which will work for most (but not all) media .. and when it doesn't quite work and you notice; you can't stop noticing.

There have been some server-side issue with the repo in the last week or so resulting in connectivity issues for some users. It should be resolved now though (hopefully).

LE support for N2 is a little basic but will work if your media needs are simple (8-bit H264/HEVC and 1080p max) which might well be the case if you're coming from a C2 board (see the release notes for LE11b2 for details). CE will be a better option on N2 for feature-completeness until upstream support progresses; but note their direction is already moving on from the codebase that N2 requires (to something incompatible). In that sense some of the Allwinner and Rockchip boards are more long-term supportable since the codebase is already upstream (or headed firmly in that direction). They're often a bit cheaper too.

I use an RPi4 as the family daily-driver and have no glitches with any local media (aside from very broken test files). Have you enabled "Adjust refresh" and whitelisted modes, or are you forcing everything to the desktop resolution (1080p@60)?

Old and slow SD cards are great for debugging issues with problemattic boot because they don't support the faster access modes which can trip an Amlogic silicon bug causing mmc device instability. The kernel has a workaround for the bug but it's not perfect (perfect doesn't exist) and issues do arise sometimes. Old slow cards also negate the need for custom device-trees in most cases.

If you edit uEnv.ini and change "quiet" to "quiet ssh" (adding ssh to boot params) the SSH service is forced on and you can probably access the box to run "pastekodi" and share the URL so we can see the system log and kodi log to look for service start failures and other issues.

NB: please use the "box" image here: https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/ as it has some extra things inside to help testing (maybe).

Quote from Andrew K

So I have a feeling that while I might have been running 10.6.12 the version of the database format/structure (don't know the appropriate terminology here) was based on 10.3.22.

"schema" is the word you're looking for. Glad it's sorted

No output means the submission failed (silently). Check for bad cables, bad switch ports, dirty ethernet sockets. Everyone swears their $1 Ethernet cable is fine; until it isn't fine.

Quote from LeannLL

Will this be integrated into LibreElec later? Why does this have to be done?

It cannot be default bundled because the "disable_ertm" property being set is global for all USB devices; and that may cause problems for other devices owned by other users in our large userbase that don't want that to be set (hypothetical but highly-probable scenario).

The correct fix would be to ammend the upstrem kernel driver to set the property. Then the patch can be upstreamed; we can temporarily patch our kernel sources and later drop the patch when we bump the kernel to a version that already includes it. This requires someone to create and then usptream the patch though. Any volunteers?

Is this LE 10.x or 11.x?

Add-ons > My Add-ons > (navigate to the add-on) > Information > Disable "auto-update"

If you run "pastekodi" with a network connection (even 100Mbit) it will output a URL which you can copy/paste here. We want to see the boot log included in paste.

Quote from titoasi

I have some issues while playing some videos from my HDD. The image glitches sometimes and others the system just reboots itself from nowhere. My versión is 10.95.1 and it happened in 10.95.0 also. Any ideas on what is happening?

Unless you explain what hardware is being used (and perhaps provide a sample of the problem media that exhibits the issue) .. No ideas.

It should work in any USB port really, although I find OTG ports are more likely to be powered up properly in vendor u-boot. The SD card slot should also work fine (checked before USB normally). The main issue from your description was pressing buttons after power-on; it needs to be pressed and held before power is applied, then released.

The editing uEnv.ini is not optional, and do not rename files to dtb.img like for legacy kernels. Use only the neo-u1 device-tree as others will likely not work. Use only the 'box' image as others are designed for emmc booting a specific board and will 100% not work with Android u-boot. Finally.. unplug power, connect the USB to the OTG port, press and hold the recovery button, then power on the box, and release the recovery button after some seconds. I've never seen a Neo-U1 myself, but from previous testing notes (which resulted in the current device-tree file) the recovery button is on the underside of the box (could be wrong though). If boxes have a power button, it's normally only a power button.

If you enable debug logging you should be able to see in logs if/when it throws errors due to DB queries (or writes) failing. Your MariaDB instance will need to be quite old to not work, but there is a point where that happens.