Hello folks, Happy New Year !
Suddenly all 4K h.265 movies in my collection stopped playing, resulting in (almost) immediate sad face. All of them had been playing well until around two weeks ago. Now there is no 4K title which can be played. They are in a local storage, external HDDs. 1080p are fine, system itself works fine as well. The log is here - https://paste.osmc.tv/asiruwavun.
At the time stamp 2023-01-14 21:28:13.403 T:785 the title starts loading (forgive my taste). In the end there are some errors which definitely cause abort.
Please, help.
Cheers !
2023-01-14 21:28:13.864 T:1027 ERROR : ffmpeg[(nil)X]: [hevc] Unable to set controls: Bad address
2023-01-14 21:28:13.864 T:1027 ERROR : ffmpeg[(nil)X]: [hevc] v4l2_request_hevc_decode_slice: Failed to set ext ctrl slice params
Try setting your GUI resolution to 1080p 60hz and see if that fixes it. If not try commenting out allowing 4k60 in your config-user file and see if that makes a difference.
More Info
We recommend people with 4K TVs set their user interface (UI) to 1080p. Kodi’s UI is not optimized for 4K yet and this can put unnecessary demands on your device and can lead to a suboptimal picture quality, as well as potentially cause other issues.
With the above settings your UI will be output in Full HD and your 4K content will be output in 4K.
*Information regarding the whitelist can be found here. If you have any doubt, feel free to upload some logs so we can verify that your settings are indeed correct.
Thanks, @darwindesign . I played with resolutions and frame rate before submitting the problem, it didn’t help. Disabling 4k60 settings, following your suggestion, didn’t help either.
What puzzless me most is that 4K content had been running smoothly for 2 years, until it stopped suddenly recently. There have been some system updates in November-December, I’m wondering if they have anything to do with the problem.
Sorry, not quite sure about this. Which ones are the test builds and how can I remove them ? I’ve performed my updates from My OSMC official GUI tab only.
There are discussions on github about hevc problem and suggestions to go back to previous kernel. The discussions are quite old though. Not sure if it is relevant, but can I reverse to the kernel images previous to what I have now ?
rbp464-image-5.15.83-1-osmc:arm64 5.15.83-1-osmc arm64 Linux OSMC kernel
BTW, the problem is not limited to 4K, but rather to hevc. I’ve just tried 1080p movie with h.265 and ran into exactly same behaviour - sad face right away.
h.264 are fine.
At some point you had manually edited /etc/apt/sources.list to switch over to the testing builds. To switch back to receiving only the stable updates you will need to edit that file so… deb http://apt.osmc.tv bullseye-devel main
is instead this… deb http://apt.osmc.tv bullseye main
Going back at this very moment would require a clean install (although you can backup/restore user data via My OSMC). I have now brought the issue to the attention of the dev team so they can look into it. If you don’t want to reinstall you might want to delay a bit on moving from the test builds as when they are able to resolve the issue it will come to the test builds first. You will likely not want to continue running test builds in the future to prevent this kind of situation.
I highly doubt I’ve ever done that. I do my fair share of tinkering on that very system, mostly limited to own development projects, e.g. add a new service, my own or from 3rd party, add a security certificate to nginx, etc. When it comes to core stuff I prefer not to touch it, at least on OSMC. I trust you guys
I’ve done my investigarion - once /etc/apt/sources.list can’t be modified from WinSCP (my preferred way) because of permissions, it could’ve been edited only from $sudo nano, I don’t use any other methods. I’ve searched in the ssh terminal command list, nope, it is not there. Timestamp of the file is May 8, 2022. There is no activity around that file at that time. Though I remember some major upgrade last May (was it bullseye migration from buster ?), which screwed my samba access, so I had to do something about it.
Finally I’ve quickly gone through the whole commands history back to the very beginning, spring of 2021, when I finally migrated OSMC from Rpi 3 to 4. Nope, not a trace of dealing with the file in question.
Anyways, it is there, how it has ended up this way, doesn’t really matter now.
You need to report this to OSMC. I think their stable kernel is on 5.10, and the 5.15 was only on testing, and it requires a ffmpeg update that hasn’t been done yet.
But this isn’t something we can solve here. Ask on the osmc forum.
I believe the current status is that for the upcoming Kodi 19.5 update the Kernel will not be updated and when the Kodi 20.1 release is done it will come with the new kernel and an updated ffmpeg version that will not have this issue. As such if you stick with the test builds it is likely going to be a while before this starts working again (I have no clue on a more specific time frame). As such if this poses an issue for you then you would probably be best served by backing up, performing a clean install, and then restoring your userdata which should get you back to working again.
That’s why I’m going to visit today or tomorrow my local Canada Computers store to pickup ordered SD card and start working on a plan B. It’s going to be time-consuming process, but I guess I don’t have any other choice. Never get bored
