Posts by chewitt

Rainbow screen normally means "wrong arch" .. i.e. using an RPi2 image on older RPi (and zero) hardware or vice versa. So check that you're using the correct image on the SD card.

The Slice NIC is 10/100 which isn't the best, but should be enough for streaming BR rips as long as the network doesn't have other issues and you're not contending the USB bus (which the NIC is connected to) with other devices. Kodi cache settings can smooth out occasional wireless issues but should never be required or used with Ethernet (if they achieve anything you have a bad network). I didn't try with a USB GB NIC but that's the trick used with Pi 3B+ to improve throughput (with some additional CPU load as a result).

The original SliceOS skin was never forward ported to newer Kodi versions. Estuary is reasonably light. Older Confluence has fans who claim it's lighter and it's still maintained in the Kodi repo if you wanted to install it. There are also some other deliberately light skins. Experiment and see if there's something better.

As others have said, CM3 is a worthwhile performance upgrade, especially if things are CPU bound.

Urghh.. it was late. Correct. I'm not aware of any way to swap keyboard maps without rebooting Kodi.

Time for a Harmony remote or similar..

I'm not sure what mainline branch you're building from but if it's the amlogic one in my repo; once you've created an image add "textmode" to the end of the boot commands in uEnv.ini and it won't attempt to start Kodi which otherwise fails and loops endlessly. Instead it will boot to a console and you can connect a USB keyboard to play around.

The active keymap can be defined in /storage/.config/rc_maps.cfg and you can reload the config via ir-keytable; so you could write a shell script to toggle between a keymap that only has one control defined (for the on/off switch) and one with all the normal controls present. Assign the button to something on the remote that doesn't do anything on the TV (there's usually at least one button that's harmless). Or do it the easy way and just get a second remote; or a proper smart/learning remote that can switch modes.

It's based an older (pre Krypton) version of Kodi .. you can tell by the ancient 'codecinfo' screen.

It's deliberately absent because the outrageous amount of repetitive and thankless support work it generates is/was (in our opinion) a bigger problem than the increasingly negligible speed difference between most eMMC storage and a decent SD card.

Running LE from eMMC storage isn't a bad idea, but the current implementation and user experience with that script *is* a bad idea. At some point it will be tackled in a way that makes sense over Allwinner, Amlogic, Rockchip, etc. .. but some features need to land in uboot before we make any serious efforts on that, it's a little too early.

Some community images and skins have those "reboot to internal" commands hacked in. No official images have them.

Your log doesn't show any attempts to access an SMB share. The Kodi SMB client can use SMB2/3 (default config) to connect with a Win10 share as long as the source has valid Win10 credentials (no unauthenticated guest access).

The remote app will work, but S912 devices are the least future-proof of all current Amlogic hardware.

"lost in translation"

So far nobody I asked has documentation for this chip.

я слушаю "Песня о звездах" здес, новые верси работает (Kodi v18, over SMB from Synology NAS)

Have you tested the current Alpha or Milhouse releases? .. just realised you're on 8.2.5

AFAIK the business was mothballed and eventually the assets (the intellectual property) of FiveNinja's were sold so nobody really has interest in running a defunct forum these days. If you have questions post them in the subsection here and someone will probably answer.

S905D and S905X are the same chip except for S905D supporting an external PHY (so boxes can have GB ethernet, not that all do) and the interface for internal tuner devices. The difference between SDIO and USB tuners will be negligible. More significant, especially for how weak signals are handled, will be the drivers. I cannot provide a validated answer (and i'm not sure there is one) but as a rule the not-in-kernel drivers for SDIO chipsets used in Android boxes are worse than the more widely used mostly-in-kernel USB drivers.

I wouldn't spend money on a cross-grade at this point. If you want to do an upgrade, it's time for a NUC and/or a network SAT>IP device with multiple tuners (so pre-selection is possible) and no impact on the local system.

Raspberry Pi is our largest user group (consistently around 75% of our active installed base) which means more people to report (and often fix) issues, and the Pi Foundation has long been attentive to the needs of Kodi - because great support helps to sell more boards to support their education mission. That said, the experience for 1080p/H.264 should be pretty consistent everywhere assuming the same media being played back on the same TV screen over the same USB drive or NAS/network. It's only once you stray towards exotic encodings, 4k, HDR, wonky TV's and bad network connections that you'll start to discover differences between platforms.