Posts by chewitt

    It's an RTL8821CU device, which means it's not supported in-kernel and would need a vendor binary driver. Unfortunately we have a long history of refusing to add these to the distro as Realtek breeds new chips on a quarterly basis and they tend to break with each kernel bump and are a pain in the rear to maintain over time.

    Raspberry Pi OS uses X11 windowing and since it's a desktop OS there is support for multiple screen output and multiple player apps. LE runs a single app (Kodi) directly on the framebuffer so there is no windowing and we support a single HDMI connection. LE is more lightweight so will boot faster, but if you need multi-screen output and other apps, we're the wrong distro. NB: LE 9.2 still supports the original OMXplayer decoding, but MMAL will give better results over a wider range of media and is the default on 3B+ hardware. Kodi v19 dropped support for OMXplayer so it will not be present in LE10, but it will be superseded with GBM/V4L2 decoding, although this is still in development.

    Sources solely define the locations Kodi can scrape to add new content into the Library (or can be browsed from the non-Library 'Videos' view). If you define sources on a box it can scan/update its DB, which in this case is a central/shared MariaDB instance. If you do not define sources, the device can only be used for playback of content that has already been added to the DB.

    WiFi credentials are saved on successful connection only, so if you entered the wrong passphrase it will have failed to connect and nothing was saved. Go into the LE settings add-on and visit the Connections tab, highlight the WiFi network anme, click and select "connect" to enter the passphrase using the GUI keyboard.

    The "install" script is checking for an OS that uses Debian packaging (Raspbian, OSMC, etc.) so it's not going to work on LE.

    Share "journalctl | paste" about 60 seconds aftter booting (with Etthernet connected) and we can see what chipset is in the device, and from there we can advise on the chances of it being supported in LE.

    Ahh, the original Q is now clearer. If you have two screens attached (LCD via ribbon, TV via HDMI) Kodi will use the first one probed by the kernel, and on ARM hardware Kodi does not support multiple screens output (maybe in the future, but not today). So to redirect output to HDMI, you either need to disconnect the LCD, or perhaps fiddle with config.txt and disable in software; I'm not sure as config.txt options are not my area of expertise.

    Recommentded settings for RPi4 devices are 1080@60 desktop resolution and [email protected]/24/50/59.95/60 and [email protected]/24/25/29.97/30 modes whitelisted. This ensures SD content is scaled to 1080p max and only 4K content is played at 4K, and we scale 720p skins to 1080p (which still ooks good) and leave scaling the 1080p GUI firther (to 4K) to the TV which does a better job than Kodi on any ARM hardware device. Almost nobody needs 4K60 modes as very little content exists in that format, so there's no real-world need to force that in config.txt (hence it is not our default). In some cases the best option is to revert Kodi to defaults again and resist the urge to fiddle with things that don't really need fiddling with :)

    I have Kodi set to 1080@60 desktop with 1080p 23.976/24/50/59.94/60 and 4K 23.976/24/25/29.97/30 modes whitelisted, adjust refresh enabled, and everything else video related on defaults (so deinterlace is auto) and audio on a 5.1 pcm config. Kodi outputs progressive always, so if you are working with deinterlaced content it's important to exclude the 25Hz mode as Kodi needs 50Hz to render 25x2 interlaced frames.

    NB: I don't really know how TVH is configured because someone else (one of the Kodi developers, who is Finnish) runs that bit. He aggregates DVB-S and DVB-T connections. I only use it for DVB testing in LE and watching the occasional F1 race but AFAIK the TVH bit is left more or less default. I see some artefacts and judders in the streams from time to time, but my client device(s) are 4,500Km from the server and I route everthing thruogh a VPN to the UK so I have fairly low expectations on performance.