Streaming aspect ratio issues with OSMC 2021.11-2

I have an interesting aspect ratio problem when streaming stuff from a Dreambox type (in my case, VU+ Ultimo) cable TV receiver (on Helsinki DNA Welho cable network) to a Raspberry Pi2 OSMC system. Most of the video channels I have on my tuner are these days of course HD and 16:9 aspect ratio, and they come through correctly.

However, for some (but not quite all) of the channels that are sent in SD 720×576 resolution (like YLE TV1, Nelonen, Paramount Network, BBC World News), the latest OSMC 2021.11-2 decides they have a 4:3 aspect ratio and shows them compressed and pillarboxed (black bars on both sides). The previous release occasionally did this (you could get it right by restarting streaming a couple of times), this current release is permanently in 4:3 for these.

Tried out with vanilla Android Kodi, and it has no similar issues. What has changed on OSMC?

OSMC on a Pi and Kodi on Android have very different video acceleration APIs.

You could try disabling hardware acceleration for these lower resolution channels and see if that makes a difference.

1 Like

I tried looking under Settings → System → DIsplay and My OSMC → Pi Config, but I couldn’t spot any hardware acceleration options that would seem relevant.

At Settings → Player → Videos → Processing disabling the setting “Allow using DRM PRIME decoder” seems to set the correct 16:9 stream playback aspect ratio. Also disabling the sub-item “allow hardware acceleration” has the same effect. Changing “PRIME Render Method” from “Direct To Plane” to “EGL” causes OSMC to consistently crash when trying to view stream videos.

For now I have the PRIME hardware acceleration off. Where would I submit an error report about this issue?

It’s an upstream Raspberry Pi issue and not an OSMC issue then.

Can you please point me in the right direction, as I am unsure where the upstream for this Raspberry hardware case is?