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Don Pedro · 30th May, 2019, 08:22 AM

Hello,

after xbian did upgrade Kodi to leia I'm expieriencing problems with video playback on my Rasberry 3. With Kodi 17 things were fine and ran smoothly. Now it regularly happens that video is stuttering and audio is having large dropouts. If I top the Raspi I can see that there is one of the many kodi processes that's running at 100% on one core. When I reboot the machine cpu load returns to normal, video/audio problems are gone and playback is smooth again. However after a while the 100% load on one core reappears. It appears this happens when I stop some playback and switch off the TV and hours later back on to resume watching. Not sure if this triggers it, maybe something else is doing that while the Raspi is idling for some hours. I have installed the video licenses on the Raspi, so it should be able to playback without high cpu load. With Kodi 17 this in fact was the case.

Any ideas how to located what's jamming the playback?

THX

Don

***Nachteule*** · (This post was last modified: 30th May, 2019 10:29 PM by Nachteule.)

(30th May, 2019 08:22 AM)Don Pedro Wrote: Any ideas how to located what's jamming the playback?

No idea what's causing this.

I'm using Leia for a long time on Pi1 & Pi3B+, never have seen this.

A look into log files may help Undecided

Don Pedro · 10th Jun, 2019, 07:51 AM

(30th May, 2019 10:20 PM)Nachteule Wrote: No idea what's causing this.

I'm using Leia for a long time on Pi1 & Pi3B+, never have seen this.

A look into log files may help

Not sure: A short time after I wrote that the Raspi would no longer boot. I again had the effect that the filesystem got corrupted, it's not the first time it happened. For a journaling FS like BTRFS is this leaves a smack to it. You'd epect that the FS is able to fall back on its feet even under special conditions like a hard reset, dirty unmount, etc. This time - as xbian no longer compreses the FS - I was able to repair the FS on another linux machine and make it bootable again.
Also in the past I had several times the problem that the SD Card died after using it for not very long. I always used branded cards, no cheap no names. San Disk, Toshiba, Transcend, Verbatim, etc. The last card died fully readable but I could no longer write to it, presumably the write electronics of the card got broken. After that had happen I enabled USB-Boot on the Raspi and now I'm running xbian from a stick, hoping this would clearly outlive the SD cards and. So far the stick is still alive but aparently there's no difference regarding the probablity of FS corruption.
Whatever is the case. Since I repaired the FS I did not yet have stuttering audio/video. So maybe something on the FS was causing the playback problems. But it could also be pure incident and the problem will persist or reappear. I will keep an eye on it and if problems are not gone yet I will report here...

***Nachteule*** · 12th Jun, 2019, 10:25 PM

(10th Jun, 2019 07:51 AM)Don Pedro Wrote:
(30th May, 2019 10:20 PM)Nachteule Wrote: No idea what's causing this.

I'm using Leia for a long time on Pi1 & Pi3B+, never have seen this.

A look into log files may help

Not sure: A short time after I wrote that the Raspi would no longer boot. I again had the effect that the filesystem got corrupted, it's not the first time it happened. For a journaling FS like BTRFS is this leaves a smack to it. You'd epect that the FS is able to fall back on its feet even under special conditions like a hard reset, dirty unmount, etc. This time - as

Yes, that's true. But if (meta-) data is not redundant available, it is difficult to repair a corrupt fs. And, if data is not written to disk correctly due to a hardware error, BTRFS can detect it via checksum (EXT4 for example does not have checksum), but can't repair it.

Quote:xbian no longer compreses the FS - I was able to repair the FS on another linux machine and make it bootable again.

FYI, fs is still compressed, but instead of LZ4 it is LZO compressed now

Quote:Also in the past I had several times the problem that the SD Card died after using it for not very long. I always used branded cards, no cheap no names. San Disk, Toshiba, Transcend, Verbatim, etc. The last card died fully readable but I could no longer write to it, presumably the write electronics of the card got broken. After that had happen I enabled USB-Boot on the Raspi and now I'm running xbian from a stick, hoping this would clearly outlive the SD cards and. So far the stick is still alive but aparently there's no difference regarding the probablity of FS corruption.

Seems your Pi3 is a sd-card killer.

I had similar problem about 2 years ago, a lot of Samsung sd-cards were broken, not only XBian installation were affected. All cards failed with the same error: cards could not be written anymore.

I do not know how many data you're writing to sd-card. In my case, I do not write a lot of data to it - no videos, no audios, no tv recordings, nothing. Just OS on the sd-card

Quote:Whatever is the case. Since I repaired the FS I did not yet have stuttering audio/video. So maybe something on the FS was causing the playback problems. But it could also be pure incident and the problem will persist or reappear. I will keep an eye on it and if problems are not gone yet I will report here...

If you don't write a lot of data to card, I would suppose that your Pi3 has hardware issue when writing data to sd-card

Don Pedro · 13th Jun, 2019, 06:35 AM

(12th Jun, 2019 10:25 PM)Nachteule Wrote: FYI, fs is still compressed, but instead of LZ4 it is LZO compressed now

OK, didn't know that. Whatever is the case, the advantage here is that now I can mount the card on any other Linux distro, not just xbian.

Quote:Seems your Pi3 is a sd-card killer.

I had similar problem about 2 years ago, a lot of Samsung sd-cards were broken, not only XBian installation were affected. All cards failed with the same error: cards could not be written anymore.

I do not know how many data you're writing to sd-card. In my case, I do not write a lot of data to it - no videos, no audios, no tv recordings, nothing. Just OS on the sd-card

Here the cards failed with different errors. And same as you, I have just the naked OS on the Pi. All video, pictures, audio, etc. are on my Debian server (tvheadend). So the only thing the Pi is writing is logfiles, snapshots, updates, etc. The usual minimum stuff, nothing else.

Quote:If you don't write a lot of data to card, I would suppose that your Pi3 has hardware issue when writing data to sd-card

As said, the last FS corruption was on a USB stick, currently not using a card anymore. Will keep an eye on it...

Cheerz

***Nachteule*** · 13th Jun, 2019, 08:13 PM

(13th Jun, 2019 06:35 AM)Don Pedro Wrote:
(12th Jun, 2019 10:25 PM)Nachteule Wrote: FYI, fs is still compressed, but instead of LZ4 it is LZO compressed now

OK, didn't know that. Whatever is the case, the advantage here is that now I can mount the card on any other Linux distro, not just xbian.

That's why LZO compression is supported by all Linux distributions, and LZ4 required a special patched kernel and btrfs binary

Quote:
Quote:Seems your Pi3 is a sd-card killer.

I had similar problem about 2 years ago, a lot of Samsung sd-cards were broken, not only XBian installation were affected. All cards failed with the same error: cards could not be written anymore.

I do not know how many data you're writing to sd-card. In my case, I do not write a lot of data to it - no videos, no audios, no tv recordings, nothing. Just OS on the sd-card

Here the cards failed with different errors. And same as you, I have just the naked OS on the Pi. All video, pictures, audio, etc. are on my Debian server (tvheadend). So the only thing the Pi is writing is logfiles, snapshots, updates, etc. The usual minimum stuff, nothing else.

So, that's definitely not normal. I have 7 devices in use, and apart from the mass extinction 2 years ago, never had problems before and after. I'm using Sandisk pro (16GB) now.

Maybe there is different reason for your sd-card death:
I've read in an computer magazine, that most of the sd-cards in Android phones are dying due to the power save options used by the phone, and not by writing too much data on the card.

Quote:
Quote:If you don't write a lot of data to card, I would suppose that your Pi3 has hardware issue when writing data to sd-card

As said, the last FS corruption was on a USB stick, currently not using a card anymore. Will keep an eye on it...

Cheerz

Yes, you should do that

Don Pedro · 8th Jul, 2019, 03:43 AM

(13th Jun, 2019 08:13 PM)Nachteule Wrote:
(13th Jun, 2019 06:35 AM)Don Pedro Wrote: As said, the last FS corruption was on a USB stick, currently not using a card anymore. Will keep an eye on it...

Yes, you should do that

It happened again, suddenly xbian fell back to the recovery boot as it couldn't mount the USB stick regularly, several messages "parent transid verify failed". I could get the system back to booting by mounting the USB stick on another machine via "mount -t btrfs -o recovery" once. It's weird nevertheless. Sad

Also something else on my Raspi seems strange:
When I htop for many minutes I can see that memory consumption is at below 250MB (which is fine) and CPU load continuously is between 5-10% on all four cores. Nevertheless htop shows a load average of more that 4 for all three values. This appears illogical to me, a value of 4 on a four core machine would mean continuous full CPU load! Also when playing back recorded video from DVB-S I often see the temperature warning flashing in the upper rigth corner despite the fact that the CPU has an additional heat spreader attached, I have licenses for VC1 and MPEG-2 video codecs installed and "vcgencmd codec_enabled" shows these licenses are indeed active. Unfortunately I don't precisely remember when this started but it was around the time when Kodi got the Update to Leia. Huh

As the Raspi 4 was released just these days and if the probs on my Raspi 3 persist I would consider wating till there is a Raspian release that supports the 64 bit mode of the Cortex A-72. All in all disctinctly more computing power, 4k 10 bit HEVC video, new supported video codecs, etc. should make a nice media center, though this Raspi might need some active cooling...

***Nachteule*** · 8th Jul, 2019, 05:00 AM

(8th Jul, 2019 03:43 AM)Don Pedro Wrote: It happened again, suddenly xbian fell back to the recovery boot as it couldn't mount the USB stick regularly, several messages "parent transid verify failed". I could get the system back to booting by mounting the USB stick on another machine via "mount -t btrfs -o recovery" once. It's weird nevertheless.

Hmmm, seems your Pi has a hardware problem, because that's absolutely not normal that such a lot of fs-errors happens

Can you rule out that you don't have a power problem?

Quote:Also something else on my Raspi seems strange:
When I htop for many minutes I can see that memory consumption is at below 250MB (which is fine) and CPU load continuously is between 5-10% on all four cores. Nevertheless htop shows a load average of more that 4 for all three values. This appears illogical to me, a value of 4 on a four core machine would mean continuous full CPU load! Also when playing back recorded video from DVB-S I often see the temperature warning flashing in the upper rigth corner despite the fact that the CPU has an additional heat spreader attached, I have licenses for VC1 and MPEG-2 video codecs installed and "vcgencmd codec_enabled" shows these licenses are indeed active. Unfortunately I don't precisely remember when this started but it was around the time when Kodi got the Update to Leia.

Which kernel version are you running?

Do you have OMX acceleration enabled?

What's the codec of your recorded DVB-S streams?

The high load, does that happen while playing video or always?
If latter one, sounds like this issue

Quote:As the Raspi 4 was released just these days and if the probs on my Raspi 3 persist I would consider wating till there is a Raspian release that supports the 64 bit mode of the Cortex A-72. All in all disctinctly more computing power, 4k 10 bit HEVC video, new supported video codecs, etc. should make a nice media center, though this Raspi might need some active cooling...

Yep, but unfortunately ATM, there is no software support for all those new features. It will take some time (maybe in Kodi v19) until all those features are supported.

An interesting post can be read here

Btw, it is no 64bit Raspbian version planned so far

Don Pedro · 10th Jul, 2019, 09:33 AM

(8th Jul, 2019 05:00 AM)Nachteule Wrote: Hmmm, seems your Pi has a hardware problem, because that's absolutely not normal that such a lot of fs-errors happens

Can you rule out that you don't have a power problem?

Well, more or less. Didn't yet attach a voltmeter but it's the power supply that I bought with the Raspi and besides the USB stick and a dongle for a wireless keyboard no other hardware is connected (like a hungry USB harddrive). Also the Raspi does not display the undervoltage warning. To be 100% sure I'll have to measure. Will report the result as soon as I can do the measurement (not now, it's already very late).

Quote:Which kernel version are you running?

uname -r gives me "4.19.56+". Just the standard kernel that the current xbian is using I asume.

Quote:Do you have OMX acceleration enabled?

Yes.

Quote:What's the codec of your recorded DVB-S streams?

MPEG-TS

Quote:The high load, does that happen while playing video or always?
If latter one, sounds like this issue

No, it even happens when the Raspi is all idle. When I SSH into the Raspi it takes around 30s(!!) until it asks me for the login name. The navigation form inside Kodi is crawling similarly. I have the impression that the load goes down(!) when I am logged in via SSH. Directly after logging in htop showns a load of above 5. After a couple of minutes this goes down to ~3.5 and falling further. When I restart the Raspi the boot animation appears, afterwards the liquid droplet animation of Leia 18.3 and finally the static Kodi splash screen. This one is being displayed for many seconds (didn't measure), I was already suspecting the machine hung when it suddenly came up with the user interface. So I think I will have been staring on the splash also for around 30s. This was *much* faster in the past.
vcgencmd measure_clock arm
gives me
frequency(45)=1200124000
so the CPU is not throttled!

Quote:Yep, but unfortunately ATM, there is no software support for all those new features. It will take some time (maybe in Kodi v19) until all those features are supported.

An interesting post can be read here

Btw, it is no 64bit Raspbian version planned so far

I know, sure. But don't give up hope. And with 4 gigs of RAM a 64 bit OS might get more interesting. So maybe one day...

THX

Don

Don Pedro · 16th Aug, 2019, 08:45 AM

(8th Jul, 2019 05:00 AM)Nachteule Wrote: Hmmm, seems your Pi has a hardware problem, because that's absolutely not normal that such a lot of fs-errors happens

Can you rule out that you don't have a power problem?

I finally managed to look at the PS. I digged out my old analog 100MHz Hameg scope and attached it to the 5V pin of the GPIO connector.

The power supply is a 2.5A type
I can see a stable Voltage of about 5.5V
There's a periodic ripple of around 50mV, likely the remaining voltage ripple from the switching power supply (it has the typical fast rise slope and afterwards a slow descending region)
There's some additional noise on the line of around 100mV, supposedly side effects of the CPU, GPU, etc. using different amounts of current.

Unfortunately the RapsberryPi foundation gives no detailed information about the PS, just 5V and some vague current rating:
Raspberry power supply
No data about admissible accuracy, ripple, noise, etc. But I think 50-100mV should be OK.

P.S.: The file system failed again. Xbian is booting up to where it states "network started". Then it takes a rather long time and it finally falls down to a login prompt but it doesn't properly startup Kodi (despite the Kodi splash was shown)... Confused

Will need to reinstall again Huh

***Nachteule*** · 16th Aug, 2019, 07:05 PM

(16th Aug, 2019 08:45 AM)Don Pedro Wrote:
(8th Jul, 2019 05:00 AM)Nachteule Wrote: Hmmm, seems your Pi has a hardware problem, because that's absolutely not normal that such a lot of fs-errors happens

Can you rule out that you don't have a power problem?

I finally managed to look at the PS. I digged out my old analog 100MHz Hameg scope and attached it to the 5V pin of the GPIO connector.

The power supply is a 2.5A type

I can see a stable Voltage of about 5.5V

5.5V? A bit too high for my understanding. Original Pi PSU has 5.1V output

Quote:
There's a periodic ripple of around 50mV, likely the remaining voltage ripple from the switching power supply (it has the typical fast rise slope and afterwards a slow descending region)

There's some additional noise on the line of around 100mV, supposedly side effects of the CPU, GPU, etc. using different amounts of current.

Unfortunately the RapsberryPi foundation gives no detailed information about the PS, just 5V and some vague current rating:
Raspberry power supply
No data about admissible accuracy, ripple, noise, etc. But I think 50-100mV should be OK.

Yes, should be. But if there are any short spikes, I don't believe that you can see them with your old Hameg analogue scope Undecided

Quote:P.S.: The file system failed again. Xbian is booting up to where it states "network started". Then it takes a rather long time and it finally falls down to a login prompt but it doesn't properly startup Kodi (despite the Kodi splash was shown)...
Will need to reinstall again

Maybe you have same issue reported in this thread

Please check /etc/fstab. If /boot ist not mounted correctly, Kodi will not come up

Don Pedro · 18th Aug, 2019, 11:29 PM

(16th Aug, 2019 07:05 PM)Nachteule Wrote: 5.5V? A bit too high for my understanding. Original Pi PSU has 5.1V output

It was an estimation taken from the scope's screen. I meanwhile attached a multimeter to the GPIO and it states 5.15V, so this should be definitely fine!

Quote:
(16th Aug, 2019 08:45 AM)Don Pedro Wrote: No data about admissible accuracy, ripple, noise, etc. But I think 50-100mV should be OK.

Yes, should be. But if there are any short spikes, I don't believe that you can see them with your old Hameg analogue scope

Well, maybe, maybe not. But at least I have a scope to attach and not only a multimeter that won't tell you anything about stability. And it also is 100MHz bandwidth, not just 20MHz which was standard at the time when I bought it. So I have something that serves as a base for an educated judgement about the quality of the PS. At least there a no obviously visible spikes, brownouts, etc.

Quote:Maybe you have same issue reported in this thread
Please check /etc/fstab. If /boot ist not mounted correctly, Kodi will not come up

Well, a bit late to test that, I meanwhile reformatted the USB stick, no chance to check anymore. I wanted to test a definitely clean install, thus downloaded the latest image, copied it to the stick and did a fresh install with that.

An interesting detail came up immediately: Already during the setup, bevor installing a PVR client or any addons, with the freshly installed system never having shown a single sec of video the Raspi came up with the high temperature warning. *All* that has been done with the machine before was to walk through the install wizard, entering the licenses for the video codes and then start to change some of the Kodi settings like language, keyboard layout, etc. So there's definitely something wrong here, the CPU should be idling most of the times but obviously doesn't. And the problem is there even after a new, fresh re-install, so it's reproducible at least on this specific machine. I'm seriously considering to teporarily test another Kodi distro to check if this problem arises there as well or if it's somehow related to something in xbian.

***Nachteule*** · 19th Aug, 2019, 02:18 AM

(18th Aug, 2019 11:29 PM)Don Pedro Wrote: An interesting detail came up immediately: Already during the setup, bevor installing a PVR client or any addons, with the freshly installed system never having shown a single sec of video the Raspi came up with the high temperature warning. *All* that has been done with the machine before was to walk through the install wizard, entering the licenses for the video codes and then start to change some of the Kodi settings like language, keyboard layout, etc. So there's definitely something wrong here, the CPU should be idling most of the times but obviously doesn't. And the problem is there even after a new, fresh re-install, so it's reproducible at least on this specific machine. I'm seriously considering to teporarily test another Kodi distro to check if this problem arises there as well or if it's somehow related to something in xbian.

There must definitely be something wrong with your hardware. I haven't seen this warning symbol on my Pi's for years.

Don Pedro · 3rd May, 2020, 04:23 AM

(19th Aug, 2019 02:18 AM)Nachteule Wrote: There must definitely be something wrong with your hardware. I haven't seen this warning symbol on my Pi's for years.

It seems you are right! Pi got broken at some sudden occasion, HDMI output went away, you could still enforce HDMI output, but after some time even this stopped working, HDMI seems to be completely gone now. Pi is still running, but you can't see anything anymore, as a media center this is a KO criterion. Will buy a new Pi, likely a 4, in the hope that then Xbian distro is already sufficiently usable for Raspberry 4...

gkusiak · 5th May, 2020, 01:12 AM

(3rd May, 2020 04:23 AM)Don Pedro Wrote: Will buy a new Pi, likely a 4, in the hope that then Xbian distro is already sufficiently usable for Raspberry 4...

No need to hope: I use the 4GB RasPi 4 and I can confirm xbian works very well.