Posts by chewitt

  • Pi4, hardware acceleration, fast forward freezes

    LE 9.2 reached a point where it worked for the majority of use-cases, and then the focus moved away from legacy MMAL/OMX decoding onto the all-new GBM/V4L2 codebase. The older methods still have rough edges that will never be fixed, so if you have problem media I'd suggest you retest under LE10, because bugs/issues found there are of interest to the developers.

  • LibreELEC (Matrix) 10.0 BETA2

    Quote from eisenb11

    Will in-place upgrades be allowed on the final release? Understand it's not recommended, but I have a massive DB and would rather not rescan everything again.

    No, because add-ons frequently cause problems in any Kodi major version upgrade and the Py2 > Py3 move from K18 > K19 throws up some extra challenges. Nothing impossible for knowledgeable users to figure out, but the other 98% of our userbase will panic and use lots of bad words. We aren't going to stop people from doing it, but the warnings will stay and if people ignore them; users should expect low sympathy when things go wrong.

    That said. I would stop Kodi, move /storage/.kodi to /storage/.kodi-old, download the LE10 image file to /storage/.update/ and then reboot. It will upgrade to an empty Kodi install which sidesteps 99% the issues with outdated Py2 add-ons. Then stop Kodi, and move /storage/.kodi-old/userdata to /storage/.kodi/userdata and restart again. DB files should now auto-upgrade and you have all the existing settings etc. for add-ons (once you reinstall them) and thumb caches. Kodi settings may need to be tweaked if stuff changed. Always take a backup and move it off-box first so if something does go tits-up you can always reinstall LE-old and recover.

  • Yet another SMBv2 issue

    Users frequently try to avoid setting a credential on shares believing "no passwords" to be easier. It is not, and how different OS with different versions of SMB/CIFS software will work gets a bit random. Set a credential and then configure the things that need to access the share to use it. This is how the software has been designed to work. This is how you get a consistent experience over all devices.

  • ReSize LE Image

    Users are frequently obsessed with "backing up the USB stick" using disk imaging tools when what they should be doing is "backing up the content on the USB stick" which is a fraction of the data size (as you noticed). LE provides a backup function in the settings add-on that does that. There is also a Kodi Backup add-on in the Kodi repo that does it too.

  • Make LibreElec 9.2 with RTL8125 driver

    Code
    [    3.211046] r8125: version magic '5.4.0-72-generic SMP mod_unload modversions ' should be '5.1.16 SMP mod_unload'

    ^ the r8125 kernel driver is compiled for Linux 5.4, and:

    Code
    [    0.000000] Linux version 5.1.16 (msv@vm-server) (gcc version 8.3.0 (GCC)) #1 SMP Fri Apr 23 09:46:06 UTC 2021

    ^ LE 9.2 uses Linux 5.1, so the module is not compatible. And:

    Code
    ls: /usr/lib/firmware/rtl_nic: No such file or directory

    ^ means even if you built the right kernel module, you did not put the firmware in the correct directory (because that's the correct one).

    I wasn't able to check the contents of http://80.251.144.40/update/RTL8125B-9.005.01.tar.gz as the file didn't download for me, but my guess is the package contains a pre-built module for Linux 5.4 in addition to sources, and even if you do build the module from sources in the LE build system, the script is copying the wrong .ko into the image; giving you the bad magic message. I would download the sources from the awesometic Git repo as this doesn't contain pre-built modules.

    On the firmware side; again I couldn't download the file to check contents but you're not moving the file to the correct location. I would not call ./install scripts writen for other build systems. Just do simple "cp" to the correct destination. Look at other packages and the format and $VARIABLE names to use for source/destination are simple to follow.

  • s802 / Realtek RTL8723BS

    It is nnot supported by anything we've ever officially produced and options will be VERY limited. There are some unofficial images that support Meson8 hardware; whether they work on a MXIII clone box is always a dice roll since there are 30+ manufacturers of externally identical boxes with different PCBs and combinations of components inside. You'll have to search the forum for threads and experiment.

  • MECOOL M8S Plus DVB S905D / tuner support?!

    LE supports a wide variety of ARM SoC hardware devices. CE supports only Amlogic devices. The CE 9.2 release is probably the best option for the box right now. LE has experimental modern kernel images (see nightly test images) but there is curently no support for the onboard tuner hardware in the upstream kernel. Out of tree tuner and demod drivers exist (in rough format) but the V4L2 demux driver needs to be written from scratch and this is unlikely to be done anytime soon. CE has dropped support for GXBB devices in their K19 images, so the future is not straightforward .. LE is not ready and CE doesn't exist.

    It's best to ask for CE help in their forums.

  • develop/testing setup for pi?

    Netboot + Some additional utility scripts that are embedded in test images. Everyone has their own personal workflows so nothing is really standardised at an LE level. If you'd like to understand how it can/should be done, find the Embedded Linux Conference presentations on YouTube from Bayrlibre, Collabora and Pengutronix on building a LAVA lab for KernelCI missions.

  • Minux NEO U1 experiments

    If "used to be fine before" refers to legacy LE/CE images you should probaably stick with them. There is about 1% driver code in-common with the upstream kernel so current LE images with mainline kernels are effectively a complete rewrite. Modern kernels have quite good overall OS support and I can work on creating device-trees and such to enable more boards/boxes to be supported, but the media capabilities are not in good shape. There is no hardware HEVC decoding support, and while the H264 decoder is implemented it needs work, and some major changes in ffmpeg. I don't write code, so I have no ability to fix any of that stuff.

  • Upgrading RPi4 running off hard drive leaves me with a black screen

    Quote from menkalos

    I just followed the instructions to update to the latest version of LibreElec and Kodi.

    LibreELEC (Matrix) 10.0 BETA2 – LibreELEC

    LibreELEC (Matrix) 10.0 BETA1 – LibreELEC

    ^ well, the instructions clearly state *** DO NOT UPGRADE! *** so by ignoring them and upgrading you broke your install :)

    I'd suggest you (re)start with a clean install on SD card, then migrate files to the USB drive once working.