[chrisrbk]

Bobones,

I've fixed it, now running 5.0.1.

There is a trick to using twrp.

I guess the usb a to a I ordered will not be required.

Very happy :-) !!!!!

[bobones]

Great stuff Chris. Please give us a detailed account of the tricks you used to fix it for future reference. Do you find CEC works better with 5.0.1?

[chrisrbk]

ok...here goes...

I prepared a bootable fat32 sd card as per your guidelines, this would not work as I could not get it to enter recovery with the button on the board.

I found that shorting some pins on 1 of the chips (NAND?) and then applying power I could access TWRP.

the next problem was all the 'e: could not mount' errors...

if you go into TWRP mount section you can only select external sd and usb.

so I went into reboot and hit recovery, the box reboots and goes back into TWRP on its own without shorting anything..

then I could mount all of the drives shown in the mount section.

still had issues, so I went to the wipe section, and then advanced, I selected to wipe everything except int sd, ext sd and usb. that succeeded

then just select internal sd on its own and click the repair button.

now you can go to install and select the 5.0.1 zip file from a usb and it install it fine.

before I rebooted I then flashed the original bootloader back in to get the remote to work.

it then restarted successfully, so I logged in from pc and dropped in a good working remote.conf.

I added a source and watched the start of a movie and all looks good. can not comment on anything else.


regarding shorting pins, if anyone can post a pic of the nand flash chip ill try point out which they were.


thanks again bobones you are a great help

[bobones]

Thanks for that detailed account Chris. It will surely help others who accidentally brick their boxes for whatever reason. I'm still baffled as to what happened with yours as using the tar update is usually pretty safe.

Here is a pic I took of mine if you'd like to point out the pins

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0By1kQU...authuser=1

[chrisrbk]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7cyhYZ...sp=sharing

can you see that??

if you look where the red arrow is pointing and imagine that the pin to the left is number 1, i was shorting either 6 & 7, or 7 & 8. my eyes aren't good enough to be able to tell exactly.

you basically short the pins with a needle or similar, and apply power, keep the pin in place, after around 5-10 seconds the led goes blue and then you can remove the pin.

it will then either boot into TWRP or android recovery recovery depending whats on your sd card.

i could not get it to boot from a usb stick even after modify the file from /sdcard to /udisk


** the writing on your chip is different to the writing on mine, but i would imagin the same is possible

[lstar337]

bobones, are you thinking of installing 5.0.3?

I'm hoping Kerber will take a look at the graphics glitching now that he has confirmed it is a bug.

Thanks for mentioning the slow samba speed, I have given up on it for now until the speed is improved.

[chrisrbk]

by graphics glitching do you mean when your halfway through a movie and it locks up with a permanent stutter and you have to pull the plug? i ended up going back to 5.0.0 because that was so annoying

[lstar337]

No Chris, the glitching I get is in the Kodi GUI, mostly when scrolling through movies in in a cover flow type view. I get no problems at all during HW video decoding, smooth as a babies butt!

[lstar337]

bobones, did you try samba over cabled lan from the x4?

If so, was it any faster?

[bobones]

It is marginally better at around 7MB/s, but still poor. 5.0.3 seems to be an improvement for 23.976 playback but CEC has taken a step backwards from 5.0.1 for me.

[neal73]

Has anyone managed to get SPMC working on this, without the stuttering for HD video? It runs perfectly apart from this, and a lot smoother than the packaged XBMC.

[bobones]

I haven't tried SPMC for a long while, but make sure you have AMLogic hardware decoding enabled in the Video Output settings.The last time I looked, standard Kodi 14.0/14.1 seemed to work fine. Kerber's latest OpenELEC 5.0.3 is working great for me so I am sticking with that as I have no interest in other Android apps.

[TheOverseer]

Has anyone managed to get SPMC working on this, without the stuttering for HD video? It runs perfectly apart from this, and a lot smoother than the packaged XBMC.

SPMC works fine for me on HD Video, though I am using a custom ROM posted on the Mbox.co.za forum.

[chrisrbk]

what custom rom are you using TheOverseer?

[harryw66]

Hi All,
Apologies if this has been raised before but I did a quick search and nothing obvious...

I purchased the X4 last week and over the weekend, I had 2 instances each of the following issue:
1) Press the remote power button whilst playing a movie in XBMC and whilst the led goes from blue(on) to red(off/sleep), the movie keeps playing. If I keep pressing the remote power button, it changes the LED colour but the movie continues playing and XBMC movie playback does not respond to any of the remote or mouse presses. Only option is to disconnect the power.
2) Paused a movie in Kodi and went away for 10-15mins. Came back and the screen was blank, pressing the remote buttons / mouse buttons - nothing happens. Pressing the power button on the remote does the same as above (i.e. LED goes from Blue to Red) but the screen does not resume - no sound etc either. Only option is to disconnect power.

Note that I installed Kodi after experiencing issue (1) above with XBMC version that came pre-installed.

Has anybody experienced the above? Or does it sound like I have a faulty box. I am running the official rooted firmware available on the Sumvision website.

I notice comments about people running different firmwares - any particular one the most stable?
TheOverseer - is the Mbox.co.za mentioned the one found below and is it stable? Stability is a high priority for me. The missus loves to moan when my tech goes wrong!
http://www.mbox.co.za/forum/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=313

OpenElec would not be suitable for me as I do need to run some Android games...

Thanks in advance for any replies