Posts by CA_cabotage

    I'm using LE official 9.0.2 on a J3355B with 8GB of DDR3, and an SSD boot drive with a hardwired ethernet connection.

    Lately I've noticed that many movies will start over when nearing the end of the movie, as in probably 5-10 minutes remaining until the credits roll, sometimes sooner.

    I don't have any 4k content at all, only 1080p, the hardware itself is never even remotely taxed, RAM is never near full (~40% in use after buffering for a larger movie) nor is CPU strained (max peaks I typically see for HEVC content is ~55% one one core with ~45% on the other, typically well below that though) , both the boot drives and storage drives aren't near full and I also buffer large portions of the media to RAM - so it's all been preloaded to buffer usually more than an hour before the "loop point" is reached. The system is always on so its uptime is typically measured in weeks or months, and frequently I will forget to stop a a show series or something and will come back days later and turn on the TV to see that a show series has been looping for days on end.

    I say all this just to point out that generally speaking the system doesn't have stability issues.

    So on some media, it will decide to restart from the beginning at a certain point. If manually skip to just past that point and continue watching, it works just fine - but anytime it actually plays through that moment in the media it restarts the media from the beginning.


    Can anyone give me some insight on what is going on here and how I might troubleshoot / fix this?

    Because, my dear Watson, those are not official features. And will likely never become official features.

    You can find multiple threads on Netflix and Hulu on the Kodi forum as well.

    Well, ok. I sure don't see anything here about it being an "unofficial" feature. https://kodi.wiki/view/kodi_v18_(leia)_changelog


    Kind of weird to make an unofficial feature that isn't explicitly stated as being unofficial in the changelog - and also just happens to be in the bullet points of what's new kodi_v18_(leia)_faq#what_are_some_of_the_noticeable_new_features.3f


    I'm sure you're right - I'm sure that there's some buried bit of text that identifies it as unofficial - but it's definitely not obvious.


    To be fair - LibreElec does actually say that it isn't official, so props to them for clarity. I couldn't find where Kodi says that though (but again, I'm sure you're right).

    So on kodi 18 I see all this talk in the release about how it is now capable of playing back from your streaming accounts.

    But, the only way I've found to do this is by using blacklisted repositories.....

    So - is there some way to use this "official" feature without using a "blacklisted" repo?

    If so, could someone share this with me?

    If not - why the hell is it listed as a feature in the release notes?

    Hello all,

    I tried looking into this issue with google and IRC help but didn't get it figured out.

    As stated, many movies will not play a trailer, although some trailers do work. It appears that LE is attempting to play a DVD file? IDK if this is just the way it works or if that's the issue? Other than this my LE box is rock solid and has been for a very long time.


    Please see attached debug log. This log was taken after a fresh reboot, all I did was login, select a movie that I knew the trailer didn't work, then try to play the trailer.

    http://ix.io/1b20


    Good info, noiseless is always a good thing.

    But why is your system consuming more watts idling than during 1080p HEVC playback?

    Yeah I thought that was interesting as well.

    My best guess is that the apollo lake has HEVC decoding so it isn't taxing for the system to run HEVC playback. The Menu GUI however is not being hardware decoded so I guess it makes the CPU work a little harder to render that stuff, and there are movie art slideshows always running the background and it has to render all that.

    My system goes to idle power saving mode after a few minutes and I suspect the power draw there is less than everything I posted above.

    My LibreElec system is a J3355B and an SSD in a 10+ yr old gateway desktop chassis with a ~10yr old Antec green PSU or something like that.

    I just swapped out the PSU for a pico PSU because I wanted to get rid of the fan noise. Incidentally pico PSU's use less power, so I thought I'd share my results for anyone looking at putting together a box.

    Overall the switch saved a little over 8 watts on average compared to the old PSU, where I live that's a little over $11/yr (my system is on 24/7).

    My pico PSU (85W non-WI) & AC/DC converter cost me a little under $40 shipped form eBay. Again, I did this because I hated the fan noise in my living room, it doesn't make sense for power savings.

    However if you're building new and don't have a PSU lying around, it might make sense for you.

    You can get a bargain bin PSU starting at about $20, if you care about 80 Plus, then you start at about $35.
    In these cases the picoPSU with it's totally silent operation and low power usage might be worth it!

    Old PSU | picoPSU
    Idle 23W | 14W
    400 Mbps 4k HEVC 10 bit 28W | 21W peak, then 15W
    1080p HEVC 18W | 10W

    Hi, That's great to hear; however my nuc6cays (J3455) seems to be running the same clip in software (indeed all four cores are maxed out, and stutters a great deal). Can confirm whether you are using the "standard" build or one of the nightlies/something someone else have compiled? I've also applied the latest firmwares using a windows image.

    Thanks in advance!


    I'm using the latest Fritsch Frueberger build.

    Just as an update, I finally updated my system to Fritsch's 8.0.0.0 Generic build with HEVC 10 bit support.

    My J3355B handles 10 bit HEVC flawlessly.

    I initially thought that it was stuttering on jellyfish-400-mbps-4k-uhd-hevc-10bit.mkv, but then i realised that the file was just buffering because it's a 1.4GB file that last a few seconds. So I paused for a second to let the cache fill up, let it play and it was flawless. CPU averaged about 20%.

    That's very impressive from a passively cooled $55 SoC that I threw into a ten year old desktop chassis & PSU with a seven year old laptops RAM.

    Probably just a rule that needs to be suppressed for false positives, but I thought it might be worth mentioning here. I don't know if there is anything that can be done programming side to prevent this?

    LibreElec updates triggers an alert on suricata ET rules.

    alert http $HOME_NET any -> $EXTERNAL_NET any (msg:"ET POLICY Python-urllib/ Suspicious User Agent"; flow:established,to_server; content:"Python-urllib/"; nocase; http_user_agent; depth:14; content:!"dropbox.com|0d0a|"; http_header; reference:url,http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php; classtype:attempted-recon; sid:2013031; rev:4; )

    With stable Kodi v17 just around the corner, hopefully we start seeing v19 alpha builds within the next few months! I know there's the 10 bit workaround that's already been out there for awhile now, but I'm holding out until 10 bit support at least gets worked into an official Alpha build.

    I'm in the process of building a Apollo Lake LibreElec box so I can try and answer any questions once finished.

    Have you tried piotrasd's build from the Kodi forums? Intel Apollo Lake

    Looking forward to hearing how it goes for you!

    And no I haven't, I don't currently have any 10 bit content (although have passed up several that I wish I could play back now).

    I would like to play back 10 bit, but more importantly I want a stable system, so running Alpha software is about as far as I'm willing to go. I will wait until the fix comes around in some type of official release.

    Once 10bit support comes to a stable release I'll probably just go back to running stable releases so I can get maximum reliability.

    A builds have worked overall very well, but theres still the occasional hangup requiring a reboot that I suspect is due to A software.
    Reboot take all of 10 seconds, but prefer that the wife & guests can just use it without any troubleshooting at all.


    Have you tried bringing up Kodi OSD and go to video settings > view mode > normal ?

    Video playback - Official Kodi Wiki

    This should be the default setting. Maybe you have changed it to something else by default, in which case you can go "set as default for all videos" once you have fixed it.

    How do I get to this? I don't see this menu under any of the settings?

    Is the Kodi OSD something different than just going to settings section?
    [hr]
    Nevermind, I got it! Google told me just press Enter or M while playing a video! Normal worked, thank you very much!

    I run LibreElec 7.90.008 and can't figure out how to get sub 1080p content to scale to fill the screen?

    The content is on a 1080p Samsun 55" display and UI is set to 1080p.

    Anytime I play sub 1080p content the display still outputs @ 1080p (which I expect) I don't know if my tv even supports lower resolutions? But content displays at its native resolution.

    So 480p content will display as a small box in the center of the screen that is about 640x480 pixels.

    720p will display as a slightly large box in the middle of the screen that is about 1280x720 pixels.


    This isn't just a content issue either, my last setup was an old laptop with a cracked screen running Kodi v14 all the time and the exact same files would scale to fit the entire screen on that setup. Now nothing scales, it just shows at its native resolution in the middle of the screen.

    How can I fix this so that everything simply fills the screen automatically (or close to it, I don't care if there are some small bars at top and bottom).

    To be clear I know that I can adjust the zoom settings on my tv, but that is not a fix just a workaround.

    I know this functionality exists (or at least it worked this way in Kodi v14), I just can't figure out how to get it going again?


    Hmm... I'm wondering about your J3355B-ITX choice for 10Bit and 4K for the next 10 years. The J3355B-ITX can perhaps decode 10Bit, but it won't ever output it as 10bit (8 bit I guess), because of its HDMI 1.4 port. Also the 30Hz limit will be something that will bother you perhaps for 9 of the 10 years, that you are planning to use it :/.

    The ASRock J3455-ITX has a DisplayPort to HDMI converter chip, which gives it HDMI 2.0 capability including 60Hz and HDCP 2.2. So it should be fully HDMI2.0 compatible, including perhaps 10 Bit output (not just decode). But regarding 10 Bit output I wouldn't be so sure, as it is nowhere mentioned when I fly about the data sheets.

    Has anybody read about output of 60Hz and 10Bit on Apollo Lake yet? This J3455-ITX sounds pretty interesting, I'm considering to buy it.


    Honestly neither will bother me, 30Hz certainly won't, almost 100% of my content plays back at 24Hz, I honestly don't know what people are wanting to watch at 60Hz on an HTPC?. I didn't know about the eight bit output though, good point and thanks for bringing that up! And if it does bother me in a few years, I'll pick up the latest version for another $60. This obviously isn't state of the art at $60 for Mobo and CPU, but as far as your average HTPC goes I still think that 30Hz, 8 bit 4k has a ton of bang for the buck and will last most users for many years, maybe not ten for me though ;).
    [hr]


    fritsch said on the kodi forums that 10bit hevc isnt supported at the moment for intel, will probably have to wait until v18

    There's the reason then, thank you!