Posts by chewitt

Users tend to focus on "my device can do 802.11b/g/n/ac" but in reality WiFi is a lot more nuanced than "n" and "ac" as each country can (and most do) set their own wireless regulations which dictate the radio properties a router can legally use in that country. Until recently forcing a specific country has been a very occasional thing which is why it's remained an SSH console hack. RPi4 appears to be changing the requirement; more users are using its built-in WiFi as it's more usable (RPi3/3+ aren't good for WiFi) and there are a lot more users (RPi4 is popular) and it's somewhat important to set the radio properties of the WiFi card to match the router if you want everything to work correctly. LE master branch (will be LE10) already has the config setting moved to the GUI. Next step will be to add something into the setup wizard. If we create a 9.2.3 release (not yet, but if/when Kodi do an 18.7 releasae we'll bump) I'll ask for the first part to be backported.

I had issues booting GT-King Pro using the original Android factory firmwares as Beelink tweaked the u-boot environment to minimise the point in the boot sequence where u-boot waits for input (e.g. IIRC the power button on the Pro being pressed). This makes the boxes boot a little faster, but also makes them a pain in the rear as you need to press the button at exactly the right time (measured in ms) to invoke restore mode; then u-boot checks SD/USB media for images and finds LE and boots. The official response from their developers is "keep pressing the reset button during boot" and after a few attempts you'll get the timing right. More recent Beelink firmwares appear to be easier to interrupt and work with so I assume they increased the wait period a little. I forget which firmware I have installed now (as only booted it once or twice) but it was from ~October ish last year. It's a nice box once you get over the install hurdle

The /storage/.smb/smb.conf location is not used anywhere in modern versions of LE .. use /storage/.config/samba.conf (rename the sample conf) and set the following values (notice they are uncommented):

# The following are default values for the master selection process

local master = no

preferred master = no

domain master = no

os level = 100

reboot to make the new config active; if /storage/.config/samba.conf exists it is used in preference to the embedded one.

This will not prevent one of the LE devices from being elected master in the event you turn off the server master browser; the system works to always have one elected master. However, with that config and the high oslevel value (lowest is better in an election) the LE devices should conceed the election to the server quickly when it reappears, although quickly is not a word that should be used here.

Check cables .. that's always a source of potential issues. You could also put the AMLGX image at Index of / on a spare SD card and see what things are like under tthe mainline kernel. Video playback in those images has some challenges, but we're interested in HDMI stability, so testing a completely different (but familiar looking) OS on the same hardware might rule in/out a hardware fault.

My recommendation would be to test playback over SMB or NFS .. as this isolates the issue to WebDAV. If it works over SMB .. you can take the issue to the Kodi forums as it's their WebDAV code that's the issue. NB: I'm not sure anyone in current Team Kodi uses WebDAV so it's probably not a well-maintained feature, hence the suggestion.

No harm in skipping if you didn't need the update, but if auto-update is enabled on your end it will eventually auto-update; we didn't enable it for 9.2.1 as we didn't want to force a potentially non-working update on people. Now 9.2.2 is available to fix that we'll turn it on.

Quote from vi7al

1. Could you please share any link where I can track FFmpeg rework mentioned by you (github, whatever?)

2. What would be a proper thread to discuss LE9 nightly builds issues like the one I have with wifi? From my understanding current thread is dedicated to the Oleg's builds.

1. Nowhere exists until someone starts the work.

2. Start a thread under the Amlogic section - it's as good as anywhere for now.

Video playback is still "work in progress" on the mainline kernel but MPEG4 video should be software decoded anyway which should negate that.

Please share a Kodi debug log file (current one is not debug), and upload a sample of the file somewhere so I can download and see first hand. You can remove the file after it's been downloaded.

Neil is overdue on sending a patch that will disable 4K modes for S805X as they are not properly supported and fixing that on a device that is designed to be 1080p only is a super-low priority. That's unlikely to be the problem if you're using a 1080p panel.I don't think it has anything to do with CMA size as the 896MB allocation already fails gracefully to 256MB. Perhaps try building LE without any kernel patches (default kernel only), and if that works start to add back groups of patches (they are somewhat logically sorted and grouped) until something breaks to pin down the issue.

LE settins are not in the pre-defined list because our add-on is an independent background service, it is not part of Kodi.

The bottom-left corner of the web GUI has a "remote" navigation panel that you can use to reach LE settings.

erbas I'm already on Linux 5.6 and will bump LE master to Linux 5.7 around 5.7-rc2 to keep the patch count under control. This means I am always working on a kernel one version ahead of working media_build support (which always lags) so there's no point in adding the drivers. Once video and audio things are more upstream (around 5.8) we can probably realign with the x86_64 kernel version and reintroduce those drivers.

NB: News on the DVB front is that I submitted the missing pinctrl change on behalf of afl1 (his first in-abstentia commit to the kernel) and those are now merged upstream for Linux 5.7 .. and we've been coaching Availink on their efforts to provide public and modernised sources for their demod and some related tuner drivers. The mainline codebase will need someone to write a new V4L2 compatible demux driver, but I think that can be done, maybe by the Availink folks. I wouldn't expect usable code anytime soon, but there's light at the end of yet another long dark tunnel.

vi7al FFmpeg rework is not done so video seeking doesn't work and at end of playback numerous codecs will lock up. Until that work is done I have little interest in video issues (because we know there a loads). No idea about the WiFi issues; in theory there shouldn't be any device-tree or firmware differences between LE images and Olegs. The dmesg log would help understand that.

I already did.. The world’s leading software development platform · GitHub <= mostly for code but you can share anything really.

Put Dropbox - u-boot.ext - Simplify your life in the root folder of the SD card and reboot and blue/green colours should go away. It's a hack to chain-load mainline u-boot, but it works until we figure out what the proper solution is. No idea what the issue with Enigma plugins is .. best to share log-files in the DVB section of the forums and someone might take a look.

Question .. is the TV/monitor that you've connected the device to a 1080p or 4K screen?

There is a bug in 9.0.2 (there is no 9.2.1 release for the Core) and while a few people claimed to have fixed it nobody ever shared the fix so there's never been a 9.0.3 to resolve it. Since then we switched our focus towards mainline kernel support for Amlogic devices, and this is not currently possible for Meson8* hardware (no HDMI driver). Not the best report card, but that's the situation. LE 8.2.5 should work .. stick to that.

"What you see is what you get" (today). I wouldn't expect any further changes/enhancements in the LE 9.2 codebase (first to support RPi4) as all the audio development is focussed on newer kernels and the codebase that will eventually become LE10. The goal is pass-through and high-bitrate support, but it's an entirely new SoC so everything has to be figured out from scratch without much prior-art or documentation to follow.