Kodi Community Forum

I've just discovered that a lot of my old collections of shows won't play at all on Kodi via my Fire TV Gen 3 or my Sony Android TV with Kodi v 18.5.  Disabling hardware acceleration fixes the problem, but it also makes it impossible to watch anything except these old ass avi files from almost 20 years ago.  Is there something I can put in the advancedsettings.xml file or something that would disable hardware acceleration on all AVI files?  I would really hate to re-encode thousands of episodes of shows just to make them work on all my devices.

Yes there is. It's called decoderfilter.xml

Start kodi once and close it. Now connect to your android disk (file explorer or whatever and download the decoderfilter.xml - it's in the hidden .xbmc/userdata directory). In there you find:

<name>OMX.MTK.VIDEO.DECODER.H263</name>

and

 <name>OMX.MTK.VIDEO.DECODER.MPEG4</name>

set their allowed attribute to false and save the file.

I set them to true, but the min-height to 720. So that higher bitrates are hw accelerated again

(2020-02-19, 21:06)fritsch Wrote: [ -> ]Yes there is. It's called decoderfilter.xml

Start kodi once and close it. Now connect to your android disk (file explorer or whatever and download the decoderfilter.xml - it's in the hidden .xbmc/userdata directory). In there you find:

<name>OMX.MTK.VIDEO.DECODER.H263</name>

and

 <name>OMX.MTK.VIDEO.DECODER.MPEG4</name>

set their allowed attribute to false and save the file.

I set them to true, but the min-height to 720. So that higher bitrates are hw accelerated again

The only thing I can find with H263 is this and it's already set to false:

<name>OMX.google.h263.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>

Same thing with MPEG4:

 <name>OMX.google.mpeg4.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>

I'm guessing it's different from yours because this is on a Fire TV which runs Android?

If it helps, here are the contents of the entire file:

<decoderfilter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.amlogic.avc.decoder.awesome</name>
        <allowed>true</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>true</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.amlogic.hevc.decoder.awesome</name>
        <allowed>true</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>true</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.amlogic.mpeg2.decoder.awesome</name>
        <allowed>true</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>true</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.amlogic.mswmv3.decoder.awesome</name>
        <allowed>true</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>true</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.amlogic.vp9.decoder.awesome</name>
        <allowed>true</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>true</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.amlogic.wvc1.decoder.awesome</name>
        <allowed>true</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>true</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.dolby.ac3.decoder</name>
        <allowed>true</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>true</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.dolby.eac3.decoder</name>
        <allowed>true</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>true</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.aac.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.amrnb.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.amrwb.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.g711.alaw.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.g711.mlaw.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.h263.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.h264.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.mp3.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.mpeg2.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.mpeg4.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.opus.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.raw.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.vorbis.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.vp8.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
    <filter>
        <name>OMX.google.vp9.decoder</name>
        <allowed>false</allowed>
        <stills-allowed>false</stills-allowed>
        <dvd-allowed>false</dvd-allowed>
        <min-height>0</min-height>
    </filter>
</decoderfilter>

Check again. It's not the google ones, but the others. Best: post your complete file.

the OMX.google.x are disabled for everyone, cause they are SW decoders.

(2020-02-19, 22:21)fritsch Wrote: [ -> ]Check again. It's not the google ones, but the others. Best: post your complete file.

the OMX.google.x are disabled for everyone, cause they are SW decoders.

I edited my last post with the entire contents of the file just as you were posting this.

Would the fact that there are no hardware decoders listed for H263 and MPEG4 be the reason why the files won't play?  Should I just enable the software decoders for those entries?

EDIT: Well, enabling the software entries didn't do anything.

EDITED because I posted a rant that was due to something that I did accidentally and it's now not pertinent to the topic.  I'm still having the same issue though.

Alrighty then.  I just reinstalled Kodi and it fixed the problem entirely.  I haven't fixed it on the Sony TV yet but I'll try to do that tomorrow.

EDIT: It turns out that reinstalling Kodi didn't completely fix the problem for all shows.  But redoing my SMB shares of the problem folders seems to have fixed that part.