Kodi Community Forum

Hey all,

My System Setup

1. Intel Celeron 2820 NUC
   
2. Harmony 515 remote
   
3. Sony Bravia monitor and a NAD D3020 USB direct amp (both working perfectly with kodibuntu)
   

I have kodibuntu installed onto 3 separate USBs. 14.04, 14.10(dist-upgrade) and 15.04(do-release-upgrade) and they all experience the same degraded, low res, pixilated images and videos.

I have changed the bios graphics memory allocation to the max (512MB) which it shares from my 8GB ram and there has been no change.

I have also gone into the Software and Updates and "Additional Drivers" and selected the "Using Processor microcode firmware for Intel CPUs for intel-microcode (Proprietary)" item and rebooted.

Note: Image below is just one i found online and has the driver unselected but I have selected it in my setup.



If I can't solve this then I will just go back to TinyXP which I dont want to do just yet.

What is the media you are playing? Local, Network, or Online?

Can you post a debug log (wiki) while playing a video?

Hey Irusak - thanks for the suggestion.

I think I missed out some details to help troubleshoot this. Firstly, this is at the OS level. What I mean by this is that even the images in the OS theme and inside of webpages in chromium are grainy. This doesnt seem to be specifically related to kodi but more the 'buntu' side of things.

To answer your questions, I am connected via 1GB LAN to a router(Gargoyle) and that is connected to a QNAP nas with a 1GB connection also. I can get logs tonight.

Have you ever tried to install Kodibuntu on a HDD/SSD?

And I won't use ubuntu 14.10 or 15.04 . I would take the installed distro and do only a "dist-upgrade" to Kodi 14.2. This will upgrade your distro to 14.04.2. Kodibuntu is shipped with a 14.04 LTS (Long term support) Ubuntu and you will get support for this until 2019. So there is no need to upgrade the distro to get issues solved.

Do you really need a desktop environment which Kodibuntu offers? If yes, why not installing it on a HDD? Costs?

What resolution are you running at? Open a terminal and type

xwininfo -root

or

xrandr

(2015-04-28, 09:13)David1977 Wrote: [ -> ]Have you ever tried to install Kodibuntu on a HDD/SSD?

And I won't use ubuntu 14.10 or 15.04 . I would take the installed distro and do only a "dist-upgrade" to Kodi 14.2. This will upgrade your distro to 14.04.2. Kodibuntu is shipped with a 14.04 LTS (Long term support) Ubuntu and you will get support for this until 2019. So there is no need to upgrade the distro to get issues solved.

Thanks David1977: I can use 14.0.2 (trusty lts 2 i think) but I would prefer not to have to install onto a SSD as I have a 500MB SATA storage in the NUC and prefer to have the OS on a USB3 stick. It is lightening fast booting from the front USB3 port. And its convenient as I can swap out the OS. The hardware wouldnt be innaccesible from the USB install I am pretty sure (if that is what you were meaning but I could be wrong).

(2015-04-28, 09:13)David1977 Wrote: [ -> ]Do you really need a desktop environment which Kodibuntu offers? If yes, why not installing it on a HDD? Costs?

Yes, for the family to use the web browser to get nzb's, torrents and skype.

(2015-04-28, 10:50)nickr Wrote: [ -> ]What resolution are you running at? Open a terminal and type

xwininfo -root

or

xrandr

Hi nickr: as requested. I note that it says true color which is a 32bit depth usually so this confuses me even more.


I also have supplied two screen caps of this test image in chrome. The "large image direct link" will show you the original image and you can compare the differences in them but you cant tell that there is any which is telling me that there is probably some monitor calibration that I have to do in kodibuntu... any recommendations??

1. My standard ubuntu laptop with no problems : large image direct link


2. kodibuntu : large image direct link


3. Here is a screen cap from the kodibuntu of a 13GB 1080 matrix blueray rip. As you can see the noise is NOT visible : large image direct link


3. Here is a phot to show the grainyness from the kodibuntu of the same 13GB 1080 matrix blueray rip. As you can see the noise IS visible : large image direct link

Debug Log and nothing else is required. The rest is only wasting time.

(2015-04-28, 13:53)fritsch Wrote: [ -> ]Debug Log and nothing else is required. The rest is only wasting time.

Ok, ill get one tonight.

Here is my debug log with the video playing for a few seconds.

Besides a whole lot of spamming (DB Scanner) - I see plain nothing.

Play a file from local disk, please.

Edit: Also make sure that Scaling is set to "Bilinear" - as BYT is too slow to upscale in decent quality.

(2015-04-29, 19:02)fritsch Wrote: [ -> ]Besides a whole lot of spamming (DB Scanner) - I see plain nothing.

Play a file from local disk, please.

Edit: Also make sure that Scaling is set to "Bilinear" - as BYT is too slow to upscale in decent quality.

Hi fritsch, thanks for sticking by this thread to help.

My ubuntu had an update, and as I was on 15.04 I figured it was a security update, also kodi had one. I ran it. It updated to kodi v15. Now the video looks perfect.

(2015-04-29, 19:02)fritsch Wrote: [ -> ]Besides a whole lot of spamming (DB Scanner) - I see plain nothing.

My DB scanner also times out alot...however there are tons of threads about it so I will read them first as they probably have the answer.

(2015-04-29, 19:02)fritsch Wrote: [ -> ]Edit: Also make sure that Scaling is set to "Bilinear" - as BYT is too slow to upscale in decent quality.

I couldnt find this in 14.2 or kodi 15. I also searched and cant find it and I looked through all the settings in expert mode. I must be blind....

Look at the video OSD

Settings > Video > Playback/Acceleration: There is no OSD
Settings > System > Video Output: There is no OSD

Sorry if im missing something.

Play a video and bring up the OSD

Brilliant- That looks nicer also.

Thanks everyone. Thread solved!!!