OpenELEC meets Raspberry Pi - part 1 (XBMC)

[dom]

@sraue – excellent.

You should remove "smsc95xx.macaddr=08:00:28:00:60:01" from the example command lines – we have our own mac addresses now!

I'd also recommend reverting:

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc-rbp/commit ... e2ccc5a4fb

Without that commit, you can't stop during the buffer playout period (which can be a few minutes for SD video), but it plays to the end.

With that commit it stops as soon as file has been read (potentially with a few minutes of video unplayed).

Also, I don't think the "CTRL+ALT+F3" debugging console is available on R-Pi. It may be happening under the openGLES layer, but you can't see it.

[sraue]

dom said:


@sraue – excellent.

You should remove "smsc95xx.macaddr=08:00:28:00:60:01" from the example command lines – we have our own mac addresses now!

I"d also recommend reverting:

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc-rbp/commit ... e2ccc5a4fb

Without that commit, you can't stop during the buffer playout period (which can be a few minutes for SD video), but it plays to the end.

With that commit it stops as soon as file has been read (potentially with a few minutes of video unplayed).

Also, I don't think the "CTRL+ALT+F3" debugging console is available on R-Pi. It may be happening under the openGLES layer, but you can't see it.


Dom, thanks much. will revert this commit soon and have added a note regarding the "debugging" option and removed the MAC adress option.

[cvtj97]

Has anyone started to monitor temps while running xbmc yet?  I have added heatsinks to mine and still recorded temps at the heatsinks to be around 55c.

[nimdy]

I've followed part 2 of the tutorial, and it seems to be booting (I can get to SSH), but I get nothing on the display. I thought I would copy over my Debian config.txt to the SD card (as I need this to see anything in Debian), but I dont think OpenELEC is reading it

[tzzhc4]

cvtj97 said:


Has anyone started to monitor temps while running xbmc yet?  I have added heatsinks to mine and still recorded temps at the heatsinks to be around 55c.



Yes and I am seeing similar temperatures. Supposedly this is still within the operating temperatures for the Pi.

[cvtj97]

nimdy said:


I've followed part 2 of the tutorial, and it seems to be booting (I can get to SSH), but I get nothing on the display. I thought I would copy over my Debian config.txt to the SD card (as I need this to see anything in Debian), but I dont think OpenELEC is reading it



On first boot I have timed mine to be around 3 mins before a grey bar appears on the bottom of the screen then another 30 secs to 1 min for the rest to come up

[tzzhc4]

nimdy said:


I've followed part 2 of the tutorial, and it seems to be booting (I can get to SSH), but I get nothing on the display. I thought I would copy over my Debian config.txt to the SD card (as I need this to see anything in Debian), but I dont think OpenELEC is reading it



When you ssh in do you see the xbmc process? If not can you check the logs (/storage/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log, /var/log/messages etc)? The first boot does take a LOT longer then subsequent boots. Also did you use arm128_start.elf for your start.elf?

[nimdy]

@cvtj97

I dont think this is me being impatient – the 'No Signal' message is scrolling round the screen for the past 10 mins. I cant get Debian to work with my display until I add the hdmi_force_hotplug=1 option to the config.txt. Unfortunately I dont think this image is reading the file. Anyone know how I can get this to work?

edit:

I take that back - the solution seems to be the start.elf as tzzhc4 posted. I've got display, but only in the top left corner in about an 1/8 of the screen! I'll try tweaking some settings...

[cvtj97]

Toggle the "windowed" option in xbmc, then you can adjust for overscan after that

[dom]

I just timed boot as 47s from power to XBMC GUI which isn"t bad. First boot did take longer.

[nimdy]

cvtj97 said:


Toggle the "windowed" option in xbmc, then you can adjust for overscan after that



That gets me about a quarter of the screen filled. Video itself plays full screen, its just the menus get squashed into the corner. Also got no sound either.

[cvtj97]

nimdy said:

That gets me about a quarter of the screen filled. Video itself plays full screen, its just the menus get squashed into the corner. Also got no sound either.
Just out of curiosity is this your TV or PC Monitor?

What resolution is xbmc showing?

[nimdy]

Its an LCD TV - LG M228WD.

The TV itself is telling me its outputting 1280x720 at the moment, but previously I had it at native resolution 1680x1050.

XBMC system info is showing 720x480, which would explain why its only taking up a quarter of my screen. But how can I change this? The window toggle doesnt seem to do anything.

[dom]

@sraue I notice you have swappiness set to 100. Not sure that"s appropriate for sdcard.
On Debian we set it to 1 to minimise swapping.
I"ve actually never seen XBMC require swap in my usage (although there are skins and plugins I"ve never tried).

[sraue]

dom said:


@sraue I notice you have swappiness set to 100. Not sure that"s appropriate for sdcard.
On Debian we set it to 1 to minimise swapping.
I"ve actually never seen XBMC require swap in my usage (although there are skins and plugins I"ve never tried).


ok, can change this too... not sure if swap is really needed, what you prefer? keeping the swapfile? if its never used... then we can remove this. I will check with our ATV1 builds (where we use swap too) if swappiness = 1 will work, if so we can set it to 1 per default.

[marshcroft]

Completed the Openelec build, made this one on a 2GB card to make the image file easy for everyone, I have done the first boot although this only took me about 30 seconds to complete and then took the image.

I cant post on here with a link to the rar file for some reason so find it in the comments on the Openelec website

http://openelec.tv/component/k.....-pi-part-2

[marshcroft]

SRAUE,

A huge thank you for making this possible, everything is very fluid, quick to boot up, smooth menu, playback of 1080P is excellent even with taking a file from the network, plugins are working great, HULU, Amazon Prime, BBC Iplayer, OpenVPN etc etc only 1 issue I see so far but should be an easy fix is I don't get any menu sounds, but I can work that one out and make a audio config file for this.

Again a huge thank you for all your efforts to make Openelec a reality on the Raspberry Pi this really is the best way to go with XBMC.

[sraue]

icyground said:


Also I setup a wiki page at elinux for collecting all usefull information: http://elinux.org/Rpi_openELEC


i have updated the site with both parts of the howto's. i hope you agree with the information and design there. Feel free to add missing informations or fix wrong informations.

Stephan

[sraue]

marshcroft said:


SRAUE,

A huge thank you for making this possible, everything is very fluid, quick to boot up, smooth menu, playback of 1080P is excellent even with taking a file from the network, plugins are working great, HULU, Amazon Prime, BBC Iplayer, OpenVPN etc etc only 1 issue I see so far but should be an easy fix is I don't get any menu sounds, but I can work that one out and make a audio config file for this.

Again a huge thank you for all your efforts to make Openelec a reality on the Raspberry Pi this really is the best way to go with XBMC.


thats nice to hear thanks much! i am unsure how to fix the audio issues, because we dont use alsa here. on builds for x86 menu sounds are handled via alsa and SDL (i think) and both we dont have with the RPi builds. I think it can be solved with the AudioEngine stuff which goes to XBMC soon. Do you really miss this? I am happy if i can switch off menu sounds in XBMC

[marshcroft]

I don't miss it, I guess others will though. I have fixed various menu sounds before on other Openelec builds ( Not a flaw in Openelec but with various different hardware setups in the HTPC market ) so I know how to troubleshoot this one easily and get it to work, I will post a fix shortly for it.

[TopherBrink]

I also wanted to thank those of OpenELEC for this. Took me 3-4 hours to build, and in the process I ended up with a nicely working long term Ubuntu install for building future RPi friendly things. Well written, well explained, well executed. Fantastic.

[tbar]

dom said:


I just timed boot as 47s from power to XBMC GUI which isn"t bad. First boot did take longer.



That's pretty decent! My 3-4 year old laptop boots OpenELEC from power to XBMC GUI in 40 secs.

Would the boot time benefit - in theory - if an USB-HDD was used instead of an SD card? (I know an SD card is required for the initial boot process.) I'm guessing that transfers from USB-HDD is faster than from SD card?

[werner]

just a general headsup…same error on xbmc build as well as openelec build streaming tuxbox

works ok to stream to windows machine running eden..

I have redacted the sensitive bits.

NOTICE: COMXPlayer: Opening: http://ipaddress:31344/

ERROR: COMXCoreComponent::WaitForCommand OMX.broadcom.video_decode wait timeout event.eEvent 0x00000000 event.command 0x00000003 event.nData2 0x0000008

ERROR: COMXCoreComponent::DecoderEventHandler OMX.broadcom.video_decode – OMX_EventError detected, nData1(0x80001019), nData2(0x1)

ERROR: COMXVideo::Open AllocOMXInputBuffers error (080001009)

ERROR: Playlist Player: skipping unplayable item: 0, path [tuxbox://apaddress/cgi-bin/zapTo?path=1:0:1:189d:7fd:2:11a0000:0:0:0:.ts]

[sraue]

Hi,

i have upgraded XBMC on our github repo to the latest state. Also i have added a patch tro fix a build error (https://github.com/OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv ... uild.patch). I cant test the patch because i dont have a board here, so it would be nice if you can build and test a new build. There are also changes to swappiness and a reverted commit to XBMC (both recommended by Dom).

It is recommended to create a full build because of some changes in the toolchain. If you keep the "build.OpenELEC-RPi.arm-devel/.ccache/" folder a second and all further build will be much faster. To do a rebuild with keeping the .ccache folder:


cd OpenELEC.tv

git pull origin master

rm -rf build.OpenELEC-RPi.arm-devel/[a-z]* build.OpenELEC-RPi.arm-devel/.stamps

PROJECT=RPi ARCH=arm make


i hope my build error patch is correct and all is working for you, please report back

thanks

Stephan

[marshcroft]

Do you know what the Tuxbox is sending the feed out in? The Raspberry only has the H.264 codec. See if you can change the format the stream goes out into, I did this for my Hulu, Amazon, BBC Iplayer streams to fix a similar issue.