Posts by chewitt

  • trouble with eMMC on rock Pi4

    RPi Foundation need to support a large and diverse range of devices that until RPi4 were all 32-bit. To keep things simple during initial bring-up the kernel driver support for RPi4 (which is 64-bit capable) was kept at 32-bit. Now that development has shifted from hoarding a huge collection of downstream patches for a 32-bit kernel to upstreaming everything to 'the' kernel, it's increasibly viable to run a 64-bit kernel, but it is less tested and proven. For LE's use-case a 2GB RPi4 is fine, so while the majority of users purchase the 4GB model (and a minority the 8GB) there's no real-world need for LE to run RPi4 with a 64-bit kernel and the RPi Foundation would prefer we used the 32-bit version until they finish porting/upstreaming drivers. In many other ARM SoCs we support the kernel is only available as 64-bit so that's what we use; but we use 32-bit userspace with all ARM devices to leverage libwidevine so users can watch software decoded Netflix and Amazon (as there are no 64-bit libs). On RPi4 YouTube (via Kodi add-ons) plays 1080p H264 hardware decoded already so there's zero advantage from using 64-bit software decoding.

    TL/DR; You aren't going to make a eureka discovery of some RPi4 performance/optimisation trick we (or the Pi Foundation devs) missed.

  • Proxy not working

    The proxy in the Kodi GUI does work, but it will only proxy communications made by Kodi itself, not by Kodi add-ons which make independent connections. It's not working as you expected, but it works as designed, so there is no bug to be fixed.

  • Can't boot after install Generic.x86_64-9.2.6.img

    It's rare (mostly seen with older HDMI-dongle devices that need 32-bit boot firmware) but some BIOS are funny about syslinux on HDD (but fine with it on removable media) and you might need to use a different bootloader, e.g. GRUB. The syslinux and GRUB boot config file formats are quite similar so it's normally fairly obvious how/where to copy-paste the kernel boot params we use. You can also experiment to see if GPT partitions (not MSDOS) show up.

  • Why upgrade?

    It depends on what you use Kodi for. The main driver for upgrades is often the add-on ecosystem; at some point add-on devs stop supporting Javis with updates and then you're forced to bump. If you're not motivated by add-ons the old saying "if it works, don't fix it" always applies :)

  • RPi4 testbuild with HDR support

    Set desktop to 1080p, it will be much faster to navigate in the Kodi GUI and the TV will do a better job of upscaling 1080p to the TV panel native 4K resolution than Kodi can achieve. Use the whitelist so Kodi switches to 4K when needed for playback.

  • Frequency of the NTP queries

    ^ running "journalctl | grep ntp" on an idle Amlogic device in the network here shows a check every 17 mins; more frequent than I would have expected but also nothing too extreme. It's not 20/minute though. Can you corroborate that frequency with journal entries?

  • flash an old 8726 MX box tv with sdcard and USB-SD creator on Mac OS

    Quote from derlinus

    Hey Chewitt, no chance to get my trusty Wetek play1 back on a supported version ?

    Nope. It's a struggle to get people to work on mainline Linux support for the latest Amlogic chips, let alone a chip from 2014 that was slow at the time it was released. There is nobody doing any work on mainline Linux Meson 6 support, so this unlikely to change, so LE 9.0 is (and will remain) the last release for 8726MX devices like WP1.

  • trouble with eMMC on rock Pi4

    LE runs 64-bit kernel and 32-bit userspace (so widevine DRM libs work), so the =arm in the build command is correct, and the aarch64 kernel conf is also correct. The original problem is probably solved by using "boot=LABEL=LIBREELEC disk=LABEL=STORAGE" in extlinux.conf instead of the GUIDs; assuming LIBREELEC/STORAGE are the partition labels.

  • Nightbuild on Mecool KIII Pro

    Someone needs to write a V4L2 demux driver before any work can be done on supporting internal DVB cards (and then there's reworking the demod driver, and the pile of individual tuner drivers). I'm not expecting that work to happen anytime soon.