Login at Kodi Home

pajtaz · 2016-06-13, 12:45

Hello,

I have a Cubox-i4x4 running Kodi 15.2 and OpenELEC 6.0.3. I have just purchased HDHomeRun 4DC and set it up with tvheadend backend and frontend. My live TV is working as it should. I have Ziggo cable TV in Netherlands.

I was testing the live TV yesterday. I cannot get smooth live TV on Kodi. I was watching football last night (NPO 1 HD - Dutch national channel) and the picture was clearly not as smooth as the output from the Samsung SMT-C7140 cable box that I use for Ziggo. I compared same channel on both Kodi and cable box, and the picture is "perfectly" smooth on the cable box.

The channel is 1080i 25fps as it comes from Ziggo. The cable box does something to the channel that makes it look smooth that Kodi cannot. Does anyone know how to make the playback as smooth as from the cable box? I have a feeling this has something to do with deinterlacing. I have tried the deinterlacing options that are available in my Kodi and of the two deinterlacing options (imx6 double and imx6 fast) neither one seemed to make the picture the same as cable box. Also, there are no other deinterlacing options besides the two that I mentioned. Is this because I have imx6 platform and no other deinterlacing options are available? Can I add deinterlacing options to this Kodi?

If it is not deinterlacing, does anyone else know what the issue is? I have already assured that the TV and Kodi are using the same display settings (1920x1080 at 50 Hz). I will try to watch the same stream using VLC and see if VLC can perform deinterlacing so that I get the same output as cable box. If that works, then it's deinterlacing.

If anyone has any suggestions or info, please post. I expect the output from Kodi to be the same as my cable box. Thank you.

rpcameron · 2016-06-13, 16:22

The problem may also be hardware decoding issues. What codec is your TV stream provided in? What codecs does your hardware support decoding for? Are the requisite support packages for hardware decoding installed, and enabled?

Cable provider STBs are specifically manufactured to support a cable stream's hardware decoding, whereas a general purpose—or in your case, single–board—computer may not support the codecs used for streaming.

The first thing to check is make sure that OpenELEC is using SolidRun's kernel with the proper drivers. Also, perhaps look into moving to a more current distribution with provides Kodi 16.2, as there were video decode improvements over what the 15.x branch had. (OpenELEC is known for being slow to update. Their current stable version ships 15.2, while Kodi is now at 16.2, which is only in the current OpenELEC betas. Also, Kodi is nearing RC status for 17.x.)

**zag** · (This post was last modified: 2016-06-13, 16:33 by zag.)

Sounds like a cubox issue.

I use an Intel NUC with kodi v16.1 which also runs the tvheadend server 4.0. Playback for football is perfect. I use the auto interlace and scaling settings.

pajtaz · 2016-06-13, 16:34

I'll check the codecs - did not think of that. I guess I can get that info from tvheadend (for TV streams) and the OpenELEC (for codecs on Cubox).

The installed OpenELEC is the version for SolidRun imx6. I was not getting automatic updates because I was modifying and recompiling the build for testing purposes. I just turned on the automatic updates and see what update I can get. I think OpenELEC 7.0 beta can be installed and I think that has higher version of Kodi. Otherwise, currently installed OpenELEC 6.0.3 only has 15.2 version, as you said.

pajtaz · 2016-06-13, 16:35

(2016-06-13, 16:32)zag Wrote: Sounds like a cubox issue.

I use an Intel NUC with kodi v16.1 which also runs the tvheadend server 4.0. Playback for football is perfect. I use the auto interlace and scaling settings.

Thanks. This could be a Cubox issue. I will check the codecs and see if I can update to Kodi 16 with beta OpenELEC.

pajtaz · 2016-06-13, 23:19

The problem is deinterlacing. I tested streaming using VLC. I tried various deinterlacing modes. The deinterlacing mode that gives the exact same playback as my cable box is Yadif 2x.

So now my question is now to enable/use Yadif 2x in my Kodi. Today I updated to OpenELEC 7.0 beta 3 with Kodi 16.1. I still do not have an option for any other deinterlace mode except iMX - Fast motion and iMX - Fast motion double. Neither one gives the same output. Actually, "double" makes the HD unwatchable because it slows it down too much.

Is there a way to use Yadif 2x in my Kodi/OpenELEC distro?

FernetMenta · 2016-06-14, 07:34

you get yadif with sw decoding or vaapi on intel. cubox means that you don't get reasonable deinterlacing, at least not for HD channels.

pajtaz · 2016-06-14, 09:29

Is there a way to simply "enable" yadif in my distro? Do I have to re-compile or can I just "enable" it somehow in Kodi settings? There has to be a way to use any filter I want or am I not understanding something?

**zag** · 2016-06-14, 09:45

Its probably a limitation with the speed of the hardware, but i'm just guessing.

pajtaz · 2016-06-14, 22:27

All, I posted a separate thread in general support forum. All I want to know is how to "enable" the ffmpeg yadif filter for my live TV stream. This cannot be that difficult or impossible. If I understand how ffmpeg filtering works, it is done in software so it should be hardware independent. So if I want to use this filter for deinterlacing in my Kodi, I should be able to add the option to select it somehow. I should be able to make a custom build or modify some options in existing build to use the filter. It cannot be that in the entire Kodi community nobody knows how to do this.

Please, if anyone has any information on what I want to do, please post. Thank you in advance.

rpcameron · 2016-06-14, 23:15

If you're going to pipe your stream through ffmpeg, then you need to adjust your setup. In Tvheadend you can use the 'pipe' type of input to filter your IPTV stream through ffmpeg, and then TVH will use the output of ffmpeg either for recording or streaming.

If you are doing something differently, then your other option for using ffmpeg is to set up ffserver for those channels you want to apply your custom ffmpeg filter to and use ffmpeg to send those streams to ffserver, and use ffserver the ffserver address for the stream in your m3u.

If neither of those options appeal to you and you want to "enable" this particular method of deinterlacing to Kodi directly, then I believe you need to patch Kodi to expose those options in its libavformat and associated libs that it uses from ffmpeg.

pajtaz · 2016-06-14, 23:34

(2016-06-14, 23:15)rpcameron Wrote: If neither of those options appeal to you and you want to "enable" this particular method of deinterlacing to Kodi directly, then I believe you need to patch Kodi to expose those options in its libavformat and associated libs that it uses from ffmpeg.

Thank you. How do I do this? Meaning, where do I find the place where the filter can be "exposed"? I'm assuming there is some file in the source code or repository that defines which filters are to be included. Do you know how to do this because nobody else seems to know even though I see lots of posts on using various filters in custom builds but nobody explains how to modify the build process.

rpcameron · 2016-06-15, 00:58

(2016-06-14, 23:34)pajtaz Wrote:
(2016-06-14, 23:15)rpcameron Wrote: If neither of those options appeal to you and you want to "enable" this particular method of deinterlacing to Kodi directly, then I believe you need to patch Kodi to expose those options in its libavformat and associated libs that it uses from ffmpeg.

Thank you. How do I do this? Meaning, where do I find the place where the filter can be "exposed"? I'm assuming there is some file in the source code or repository that defines which filters are to be included. Do you know how to do this because nobody else seems to know even though I see lots of posts on using various filters in custom builds but nobody explains how to modify the build process.

I'm not saying this is the location, but perhaps investigating the source tree might help: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/tree/master...oRenderers

If you have no clue where to begin looking for the sources for such a patch/modification, then doing so is probably not the most feasible idea for you.

If you've found that VLC plays your stream fine for that channel or event type, then perhaps using that is your best option.

Neophraz · 2016-06-15, 01:09

I know this sounds simple and may not even be the same thing, but I have found on several different front ends to my mythTV backend, that I have hooked up to my 2 HDHomerun boxes, that I have to PAUSE the picture for a couple of seconds on my front end and let Kodi buffer a few seconds of video. After that, all the chop goes away. Without it, I get stuttering and buffering issues. Just thought I'd throw this out here since I've seen it on several devices and it took me a long time (probably a lot longer than it should have) to figure that out.

pajtaz · 2016-06-15, 08:32

Neophraz, I have no chopping or stuttering. Live TV plays without issues, I just can't get deinterlacing to display picture as it should be since the TV stream is 1080i.

Rpcameron, I will check the location you referenced when I get home.