Posts by chewitt

One of the few benefits to the current Covid-19 situation is the one-man Meson 8 mission (Martin Blumenstingl) has been able to spend some quality time with an Odroid C1+ board. For some time we (mostly me) have been responding to WeTek Core and Odroid C1 user posts saying "upstream support is in reasonable shape, but there is no HDMI driver, we're waiting for a eureka moment to happen" .. and well, that eureka moment has finally happened

Before people get too excited, there is a big difference between "look mum, we made pictures on-screen" and "let's invite the unsuspecting public to use this stuff.." and there's still a lot of work needed to make things usable, and reliable on a wider range of hardware. Today we are showing one boot on one device, and lots of code stunt props were used.

The first video shows literally the first boot of an experimental AMLMX image loosely basaed on LE master with a mainline Linux kernel shortly before 5.7-rc1 (shows as 5.6) along with the FOSS mali GPU driver (lima) and Kodi 19 pre-Alpha.

The second video shows Martin in the GUI trying to remember where the system info screen is:

You'll need to share a debug log for anyone to comment on add-on issues - especially since we mostly see "updated my add-ons and everything broke" type issue descriptions with piracy add-ons, and those issues are not our problem to solve.

VIM3:~ # bluetoothctl show
Controller 6C:21:A2:9B:16:AE (public)
    Name: VIM3
    Alias: VIM3
    Class: 0x000c0000
    Powered: yes
    Discoverable: no
    DiscoverableTimeout: 0x000000b4
    Pairable: yes
    UUID: Audio Source              (0000110a-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
    UUID: Generic Attribute Profile (00001801-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
    UUID: Generic Access Profile    (00001800-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
    UUID: PnP Information           (00001200-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
    UUID: A/V Remote Control Target (0000110c-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
    UUID: A/V Remote Control        (0000110e-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
    UUID: Audio Sink                (0000110b-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
    Modalias: usb:v1D6Bp0246d0536
    Discovering: no
Advertising Features:
    ActiveInstances: 0x00
    SupportedInstances: 0x05
    SupportedIncludes: tx-power
    SupportedIncludes: appearance
    SupportedIncludes: local-name

I've no idea about the Python script, but the "Controller 6C:21:A2:9B:16:AE (public)" line contains the BT device MAC adddress.

You might want to experiment with the audio switcher add-on in our repo.

ping Kwiboo

Which add-ons need it?

Pi DAC boards should be fine (widely used hardware) and I'm not aware of any LE or hardware specific issues with Netflix; it will be as brilliant or sucky as any other non-Android Kodi device (only Android has hardware DRM support).

According to the conversation in RPi Steamlink support [LE9.2] by antonlacon · Pull Request #4319 · LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv · GitHub the RPi4 requires Xorg (RPi3 does not) which means it's a non-started on LE as we do not use Xorg.

Not technically impossible, but also not as straightforward as you assume as Kodi has a number of dependencies and reverting Python2 > Python3 is more than a simple package bump. I have a suspicion that once you chase down everything for that .. you're basicaally back to our LE 9.2 codebase which is Python2 based.

There is already an MPD add-on in our repo so building derivative audio players should be possible, but it gets complicated when chasing all the extra GUI package dependencies for things like Apache/Nginx. I'd like to see it done though, as all the ARM/Pi audio projects (Volumio/moOde/etc.) are using desktop distros as their base and 400MB images sounds a bit bloated when you're used to something around 120MB. I think LE would be a much better and more focussed base for them.

LE uses connman which stores network setttings using a unique identifier based on the MAC address of the interface. As the network interface does not change between connections, you are forced to manually change the config to change connection.

One way to work around this is using a USB Ethernet adaptor. As this will have a different MAC the settings will be cached and to change connection all you need to do is swap the Ethernet cable between ports. It will also support both being active at the same time; which device becomes eth0 will be dependent on kernel probe order but the on-board NIC should always be faster so this is probably not an issue.

An alternative is (as suggested above) to use WiFi and Ethernet, although here the default behaviour is slightly different. You can have both connections active at the same time, but when Ethernet is connected it always becomes the primary (gateway/routed) connection. This can be changed by copying /etc/connman/main.conf > /storage/.config/connman_main.conf and reordering the PreferredTechnologies line and rebooting.

I'm not familiar with Fritzbox routers and my German is out of practice, but that page looks like it is for port-mapping. Did you put the device in a "DMZ" on the router? If yes, you will probably need to access via the WAN IP address not LAN.

You might be better off using systemd/kernel SMB mounts and pointing Kodi to a "local" file path instead of using the built-in SMB client. I found this was needed with older TimeCapsule devices which also run Apple's own sucky SMB implementation. Have a look in /storage/.config/systemd for the .mount file examples.

Quote from levitsky86

Hi JerneJ!

I still can't play videos through the Apple airplay function, but only music even with this latest version and nightly update. When I turn the switch to play videos in the services menu my phone can't find LibreELEC to stream videos. When I turn that switch off again my phone finds it but only sound is streamed to my Kodi. Is there any solution?

Kodi supports video playback from iOS 8 devices or older. Since then the video protocol changed and Kodi Airplay support became restricted to audio only. If one of the open-source streaming libraries (re)gains support for video Kodi can look at updating things. Until then .. Apple thanks you for funding their locked and proprietary "must pay a $fee to Apple to exist" ecosystem. If you read the help text in the services menu (which I authored) the reason for the toggle switch is clearly described.

To rule out a startup timing issue .. SSH in and run "systemctl restart kodi" .. is the audio hardware now correctly detected?

Kodi automatically doubles the refresh rate of media when appropriate modes are available, so PAL content will use 1080p50 transparently as if it were 1080p25 and YouTube content at 1080p30 will play at 1080p60 (each frame is simply rendered twice). It will make no visible difference to playback, but having the GUI run at higher refresh rates allows transitions to be rendered smoother. I read "I forced the display to 25Hz" as "I forced stuff to look bad" .. and then you're complaining that GUI navigation looks bad.

I have no recollection of anyone on staff or userbase ever atttempting to build Xorg stuff for RPi using our build-system. You will likely run into compile options that are hard-coded to assume x86_64 and missing X11 drivers for the Pi hardware. There is also a high chance that LE drops X11 completely in the near future so the longegivity of whatever you're trying to do might be questionable. You'd be better off with Raspbian.

Unless you enabled "disable password auth" and connect but fail to login (as the setting disabled password auth) .. there is either a firewall active that is blocking traffic or you don't have the right IP address or the device is not on the network correctly. Otherwise SSH works, and has been working in the distro for years without issues.

Linux 5.7-rc1 should be released in the next week and I'll start working on a rebase and update of the patch-set. I ran out of enthusiasm with 5.6 as the patch-set is now 150+ commits and I simply lost track of everything. Kernel bumps normally halve the number..