Kodi not playing *most* video content after downgrade to 18.7

[stanis]

Hi.
I broke my Vero 4K+ in a very peculiar way. Long story short, most of video files or streams won’t play video, only audio (leaving screen either black or displaying UI, depending on settings). It’s rather similar to this:

KODI not playing any video content after 18.9 update

Hi, After update to 18.9 my Vero4k+ refuses to play any content, whether that would be from local mounted HDD or streaming. The player tries to start but I will only get “Buffering” message in the top right corner and after that I can see timer running but on the screen I can only see OSMC animated sign. Logs are here https://paste.osmc.tv/nimunoxita Any help much appreciated.

only I’m on 18.7.1-5, and some older MPEG2 video files are playing fine.

Here is an example, as reported by file:
ok.avi: RIFF (little-endian) data, AVI, 544 x 432, ~25 fps, video: DivX 3 Low-Motion, audio: MPEG-1 Layer 3 (mono, 48000 Hz)
Logs: https://paste.osmc.tv/kowuquvefu

And this is more typical situation (no video, just audio):
failed.mp4: ISO Media, MP4 v2 [ISO 14496-14]
Logs: https://paste.osmc.tv/razeqezate

Note lack of error messages.
Sometimes I see ERROR: DVDVideoCodecAmlogic: Failed to open Amlogic Codec in the log but most of the time it just proceeds to play audio without any video, or starts buffering indefinitely.

Long story follows.

I tried to upgrade to August 2021 / Kodi 19. Ended up with no sound at all - nothing from HDMI, nothing from analog jack, suggestions from No audio after August update with Vero 4k did not help.
So I decided to downgrade (I wish there was a total factory reset option) - first the vero3-mediacenter-osmc package, then everything else. Version 18.7.1-5 brought sound back but most of the videos became unplayable.
It is possible that I downgraded to a higher version than the one I had before - unfortunately I don’t remember what it was. Probably November 2020. But that version played everything I threw at it without problems.
It is also possible - I’m pretty sure of it, actually - that I did something stupid during downgrade. I know it’s my fault but I shouldn’t have upgraded in the first place.

I suspect I am missing some codecs now due to breaking packages. After all, the downgrade process wasn’t smooth, and even when apt was happy with this sources list:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch main contrib non-free

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ stretch/updates main contrib non-free

deb http://apt.osmc.tv stretch main

… I still had several “sad face” crashes due to missing shared libraries (which had to be reinstalled with apt install --reinstall)

So if there are no suggestions on fixing the video stream issue, can I ask for a list of packages expected to be installed on a pristine Vero 4K+?

If that fails too, I’ll ask which version would a brand new Vero 4k+ come with if I ordered it right now.

Thanks, and sorry for the long rant.

[ooZee]

@stanis

I wish there was a total factory reset option

There is, you need to reinstall completely.

Reinstalling OSMC - Vero 4K - OSMC

[sam_nazarko]

Hi,

I think your issue is that you’ve downgraded to a version which predates secureOSMC, but your bootloader expects secureOSMC to be present.

This version might work for Debian Stretch – but this is EOL.

wget http://apt.osmc.tv/pool/main/v/vero3-secureosmc-osmc/vero3-secureosmc-osmc_1.0.0-4_armhf.deb -O secureosmc.deb
sudo dpkg -i secureosmc.deb

Ideally, you should just reinstall the system and things will work as expected.

Disregard – your system is on 3.14, so no secureOSMC is needed.
I suggest reinstalling your system.

Sam

[stanis]

@ooZee, @sam_nazarko thank you both, reinstall helped.
Surprisingly, I am now not having any issues even with August 2021 update.