Posts by glitch

Quote from RayW

Yes the h build is good but I still have this problem I have reported a couple of times before and it is far worse with live TV and catchup material than with other moves and TV series content.

I've responded to you previously.

Read what I've already suggested in the linked response above. Also, make sure you're wired over Ethernet and not using WiFi. The bandwidth on most of these boxes is limited to 26mbps Wifi, which is not enough for high bandwidth streams with advanced audio.

Outside of that, if it's really only "catchup addons" that are causing problems, they're not supported. Stop reporting it here, and find the developer add-ons forums to reach out to them for help. It's an add-on issue and not a Kodi/LibreELEC issue.

Perfect. Glad there's nothing I missed. Thank you!

Quick question: If I set up an SD card with the dtb for my 1GB/8GB Nexbox, configure LE how I want things, and just swap the dtb for the 2GB/8GB when I want to run it on my other box, is it likely that I'll run into any problems? In testing so far it seems pretty much OK, but I'm more or less wondering if there's any sort of first-time-run automatic configuration that I should be concerned about changing the dtb after I've configured everything based on another.

Cheers

I'm sorry if you misread my response in a condescending manner, those were not my intentions whatsoever. I'll assume it's when I wrote "to explain it in what I would hope is a sound and logical manner for you", which I could see how it would be easy to misinterpret. Really, it was more or less a long winded way of saying "I hope I make sense" and was not intended to challenge or mock your level of knowledge.

I've reloaded my SD card with Krypton to test and compare with my internal Jarvis build, and I truly see no difference between the two.

When hardware acceleration is enabled, all scaling is offloaded to the GPU to process. My understanding after some research is that the s905x Mali-450 GPU is only capable of bilinear scaling in the first place. To enable anything other than that or nearest neighbor options, you'd have to disable hardware acceleration in Kodi settings. Are you sure that in Jarvis you didn't perhaps enable "Post-processing" in the video settings menu only accessible during playback, or maybe disable hardware acceleration to try one of the other software renderers that would then show up? Enabling "post-processing" essentially adds a blurring/smoothing effect on top of the scaling that would perhaps explain why you perceived an improvement in quality. Try enabling it in Krypton and see if it helps.

As for the suggested solution/workaround, it's been a long standing feature request for Kodi dating back to 2009 and still getting +1's as recent as two months ago. Page 13 seems to show that a fix of this nature was actually attempted and even tested in several RPI dev builds, but was unstable, buggy, and abandoned. It may be possible to work the feature in, but it doesn't sound like it'll work all that well.

Quote from RayW

Yes that is me that Kodiuser1 is refering too. See my post I made in the other forum thread with the new releases (maybe I should have posted here as I am new to this forum though not new to KODI and Linux builds ???) . It is post #412 there and is quite long and detailed about this very problem. My feelings are it is maybe something to do with how fast the cache fills from the online data stream whilst the video is playing fine, I say this as a freind of mine here has a much slower internet connection and this loss of all control (remote and keyboard) lasts much longer than it does for me with my very fast fibre connection.

Cheers
RayW

Any help would be much appreciated

From reviewing the original post you're referring to, your issue worsened as you added more and more addons. If you have an abundance of addons with background functions running on the device, it is not to be unexpected. Disable any library population or notification features in them so the Addons only run on demand.

I was running into this issue whenever library updates were running in the background in addition to the trakt.tv addon automatically synchronizing watched status. My issues were resolved by disabling trakt.tv and resolving all unscrapable content issues for the library.

Another issue is if you're incorrectly using network cache settings. A few quick tips to avoid overwhelming your CPU and internal memory limits:

• Never set cachemembuffersize to 0 on a flash-based storage device. It will destroy the lifespan of your device and cause hangs and slowdowns on devices with slow internal storage. If you're using cachemembuffersize, you must set a proper value so that it caches to RAM only.
• Do not set a custom cachemembuffersize that exceeds more than half your average available RAM, keeping in mind that Kodi uses 3x the active amount of RAM you specify for cache size. If your buffer size is too high combined with additional addons and background services, it will spike and go unresponsive very frequently. If you average 600MBs free RAM when idle, your cachemembuffersize should not exceed 100MBs (600/2 = 300MBs max suggested memory to dedicate from RAM to cache. 300/3 = 100MBs max cachemembuffersize to set)
• Do not set readbufferfactor higher than 2 to 4. This is not a high powered device and anything higher will cause your box to dedicate a bulk of its resources to buffering during the start of playback.

If nothing helps above, start removing addons until you identify the major contributor(s). You should be aware that the questionable addons you've suggested you're using are not supported by Kodi developer communities. If you can identify which one(s) may be the cause, you should engage the specific addon developer through their appropriate channels for help.

That really means nothing. Kodi 17 has been absolutely horrid on the majority of Android devices out there while excellent on others that Team Kodi favors from day one (eg. Shield). Aside from being obsolete due to its lack of x265 support, the Raspberry Pi is a popular and standardized hardware set that makes Team Kodi's ability to implement device-specific enhancements very easy and practical where possible, and they have an official build specifically dedicated to the device range. The same cannot be said for every flavor of chipset out there across countless Android devices.

The new VideoPlayer "(software)" (as you put it) is the interface for all hardware interaction for playback. Whether it offloads to hardware based decoding when present or CPU-intensive software-level decoding when not, it's involved in every video you attempt to play. Of course it has an impact. It's the entire backbone of Kodi's video playback.

To explain it in what I would hope is a sound and logical manner for you, my understanding is that LE 7.90 Krypton builds are still using the same drivers/kernels/device trees as the Jarvis build you're indicating works OK. The only difference is that the build is compiled with Krypton rather than Jarvis. If not for changes in Krypton itself (which there are many), you should for the most part be able to expect the exact same overall performance from it as you would Jarvis. Unless a tweak was present in the Jarvis LE builds that improved performance in scaling but is no longer present, it's not LE build related. It's a Kodi issue.

To be clear, I'm not saying that there are no optimizations that may be possible on the LE side. That is definitely the beauty of kzsaq's builds... They can be far more optimized than stock Kodi ever could, because he has the luxury of optimizing for a more limited device range than Team Kodi does. I'm still relatively new to these builds overall myself, so I'll let kszaq weigh in rather than insist upon external factors to LE being the root cause. I'm simply reminding you that there's an entirely new engine under the hood in Krypton, and I'm suggesting you attempt to reproduce on alternate platforms to confirm if it's expected behavior. For one, if you run Kodi 17 through Android on that same box, is the upscaling any better? I'd suspect not, and that right there would confirm it's not an LE level issue and would be better served engaging Team Kodi for. My point is largely a reminder to temper your current expectations regarding Krypton.

Keep in mind that Krypton uses a new, significantly updated and altered "VideoPlayer", replacing the long-used player built upon since the Xbox days (see Video Player section on Krypton RC announcement page).

Things will be different, things will break, things will need to improve with time. This isn't likely to be anything specific to these custom builds. I would suggest testing performance on other platforms first and reporting it directly in the Kodi.tv forums if similar results are achieved, which I suspect will be.

TBH, apart from the pretty lipstick (new GUI), I don't find Krypton to be up to the standards set by Jarvis in many ways. It's normal... This is a big milestone jump for them in several regards and I don't expect things to really start smoothing out again until Leia (v18). In the meantime, like you said... Jarvis worked. It still does. There's no reason to move to Krypton prematurely.

LibreELEC aside, did it work right when running Kodi through Android on that box?

First, try bypassing the receiver and connect directly to your projector. Make sure you're using HDCP 2.2 / HDMI 2.0 cables, and test more than one if it doesn't work. Worth noting is that the HDMI cables that come with these Android boxes are notoriously cheap and horrible, so use something else.

If any of that works, try connecting your box to HDMI input 4 / HDCP 2.2 input on your AV receiver. I've noticed that the Nexbox a95x doesn't play nice with my brother's 4K TV unless it's plugged into one of the UHD inputs. Different box, but same chipset... so it might be having similar problems. If that still doesn't work, then try them all.

Usually it would be that either the projector or AV receiver may not support the refresh rate of the video you're trying to play, so after attempting to switch, Kodi will default to the best available match if it doesn't get what it's looking for. Not sure what refresh rate your content is, but I'll assume 24hz if you're attempting to play back content that's not 60hz and getting a switch attempt before it fails back over. The box itself supports it, and both your projector and your AV receiver should support it from what I read off the specs page... So I honestly don't know why it wouldn't work outside of potential cable or input mismatches. Alternating the HDMI input port and also making sure you have HDMI 2.0 compliant cables both to and from the AV receiver may help.

Quote from bobobalde

Hello,

Just looking for some advice, I have the list of supported WiFi chipsets (for external dongles) - but does anybody have any recommendations? just want a dual band one that is cheap-ish as the WiFi on my nexbox is garbage.

Cheers.

Out of curiosity, are you on a 2GB box w/Bluetooth enabled? Do you need bluetooth?

My 2GB's WiFi is notably bad when BT is enabled, but fine otherwise.
My 1GB's WiFi is just fine, but there's no built in BT.

Quote from juramusger

hmm, it should work with confluence, can you tell me which part doesn't? can you create the copy of the skin and enable it?
edited the title for easier finding.

Hmmm... Let me give it another crack. The copying and enabling the copy worked fine, and I was even able to edit the resulting files to point to the video, but the video would never play on startup. Even tried multiple file locations. Once I updated to 7.90.beta3 and did the same thing in Estuary, all worked.

I'll be back...

Update: Yup, it's working. My best guess is I probably had a typo when I edited /storage/.kodi/addons/skin.confluence.withintro/addon.xml that caused it not to match up with the copy directory name. I double, triple, and quadruple checked the home.xml file originally, but since the copy was showing up in my skins I never thought to recheck the addon.xml edits before giving up and updating to Krypton.

This is why I shouldn't be tweaking Kodi @ 4AM

Doesn't seem to work in Confluence on Kodi 16, but it is working great in Kodi 17 w/Estuary. Thanks for the solid tutorial!

If you can edit the title to the post, it would be good to include something along the lines of "dark s905x HDR startup workaround" in there. Would probably get more eyeballs on it, and be easier to find in searches if/once it falls off the main page.

Edit: Confirmed working in Kodi 16. Likely a typo on my part in the addon.xml portion.

Quote from juramusger

exactly. more of a workaround than a fix, but it works seamlessly. I made a mini how-to for those who like to try this.

Thank you! This is a rather elegant workaround as far as workarounds go, and I actually like the idea of a Kodi startup splash vid anyways.

Doesn't seem to work with Confluence unfortunately and I'm not a fan of any of the unofficial skins, so I guess I'll have to put up with the darkness on boot until Kodi 17 w/Estuary is final and more stable.

Edit: Well, my curiosity got the better of me and I'm back to testing out Kodi 17 / LE 7.90 Beta 3. Seems a lot more stable than the Android builds which are still unbearably bad on RC3, and I managed to get the intro working with Estuary. No more dark screen!! Thank you!

Quote from blinkmxq

This probably won't fix the issue you're having (I've been messing around with this for a little while now), but 0 is hdr->hdr mode. 1 is hdr->sdr, and 2 (default) is auto. To disable, you'd want to use 1, but you'll probably get the wrong colorspace.

Edit: disabling AM_VECM solves the issue on boot, but most hdr material will still be unwatchable. kszaq says on github that it's needed for OSD, but I haven't run into any issues with it disabled in libreelec-7.0.

Edit2: main post implies that HDR-supporting TVs aren't dark on boot, when in reality since HDR isn't supported, all TVs are affected.

Not sure what it does TBH... But whether it's set to 0, 1, or 2, my box is always dark on boot until playing back a vid. As it stands, I have it set back to 2 for default so nothing else breaks I suppose. Thanks for trying and the additional insight though!

Cheers to you both

Nexbox a95x-b7n s905x 1GB/8GB

I keep getting ignored, so away with my old posts, and bluntness/brevity in.

Any way to disable HDR completely (e.g SSH commands)?

Forum search doesn't work to save its own life. Google site search turns this up:

echo 0 > /sys/module/am_vecm/parameters/hdr_mode

This changes nothing. Only starting/stopping a vid gets it to correct after any reboot. The OPs last question of "Any way to disable this at boot time?" was never responded to.

Another G Site Search found this, which was never addressed either:

Quote

Adding this to /storage/.config/autostart.sh should disable HDR.

Code:
OUTPUT=`xrandr -display :0 -q | sed '/ connected/!d;s/ .*//;q'`
xrandr -display :0 --output $OUTPUT --set "Broadcast RGB" "Limited 16:235"

The issue is, xrandr isn't installed.

Is this even relevant? Creating autostart.sh at the specified location and rebooting again leads to darkness. AFAIK, xrandr should be a component of LibreELEC. Is there a reason it's not here?

I get it... HDR seems to be a widely ignored and/or sensitive issue for some reason. I know the main post states HDR is buggy, and I know that you can't fix everything. That's fine. It's also not necessary on 99.99% of TVs, so is there any way to just kill it completely to permanently resolve darkness issues? A no will suffice if not. Starting/stopping video changes the video output to the correct parameters... Can logs identify a command that could be applied at startup to just go straight into the right colorspace?