Kodi Community Forum

Hi there,
till yesterday i had not any problems with the playback of mkv's, but now it's absolutely broken.
I did not change anything but the file, which i can flawlessly watch with VLC, now is stuttering like mad. The only explanation which comes to my mind is maybe an automatic update of Kodi or Linux?
My system is based on a Intel Gemini platform with a Pentium Silver J5005 with 605 GPU. I run Kodi 19.0 under Lubuntu 20.10.
I would be very thankful, if one of the pro's here could have a look at the log-file:
Log-file
There are a lot of errors with "VAAPI". Is it possible, that something is broken there?!

2021-04-18 21:16:45.125 T:933 INFO <general>: Enabled debug logging due to GUI setting. Level 2.
Please always restart Kodi after enabling debugging. That way also the beginning of the session gets more detailed where applicable.

I have an Asrock board with a J5005 setup. H264 videos worked okay last time I checked, as my collection contains mostly h265/hevc videos.
For that I had to add export LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME="i965" to the Ubuntu user's .profile file for Kodi to work properly in Ubuntu 20.04 with both Wayland and X11. LibreELEC has/had the same issue on the J5005.

But .. if things worked okay before, and don't work okay now, something must have been "updated" incorrectly. My problem was instantly.

Thanks for your answer Klojum!
Here is the log-file from the beginning.
log-file from beginning

To make sure, that VAAPI does not make problems, i turned it off. The playback remains more or less the same - absolutely unwatchable.
CPU-load is about 10-20%, this should not be a problem.

Well...
it seems, i should change the thread-title to 'strange problem with 'FFMPEG'.

To test the system i deinstalled FFMPEG at all --> the result was more or less the same as with installed FFMPEG.
So i reinstalled FFMPEG. Still flickering like mad.
Then i found a package 'kodi-ffmpeg-dev' which was not installed. I installed it. Still flickering...

When i test FFMPEG with:
everything looks brilliant.

So does somebody have an idea what can be broken here?!?

Edit:
I just reinstalled Kodi with
That changed nothing.
Is it possible to deactivate FFMPEG inside Kodi?

ok,
when i use an USB-device, there is no problem. So it should be a NFS-problem, even if the log-file doesn't show anything in that direction.
Thats a totally different thing then. So this thread can get closed.

Thanks for your help Klojum!

(2021-04-19, 23:12)contadino Wrote: [ -> ]when i use an USB-device, there is no problem. So it should be a NFS-problem, even if the log-file doesn't show anything in that direction.
Thats a totally different thing then. So this thread can get closed.

I haven't encountered an NFS problem on my setup (yet), but I'm not expecting to see that pop that up in the log files, unless Kodi simply cannot connect to NFS servers.

We don't close forum threads unless it's for a very pressing or clear reason.

I had a similar problem with Kodi 19 after I installed a LibreElec 10 beta 1 (Linux) update over Kodi 18.9 (not a clean install). I am using NFS to my Synology NAS. I’m running on an Intel NUC.

I solved by removing all my video sources, then adding each share as a new source with a new scan.

Rescanning the existing sources gave issues. I tried that first.

Another related problem (possibly). My NUC won’t bring up the Kodi menu after NUC startup if my Synology NAS is not switched on at NUC startup. The screen is black with a mouse pointer in middle. I do have a wakeonlan xml file, maybe Kodi is waiting for a NAS to start?

(2021-04-19, 20:28)contadino Wrote: [ -> ]To test the system i deinstalled FFMPEG at all --> the result was more or less the same as with installed FFMPEG.

Kodi uses its own instance of ffmpeg, so uninstalling/reinstalling will not make much of a dent in the solutions.

(2021-04-20, 09:06)HomerJau Wrote: [ -> ]My NUC won’t bring up the Kodi menu after NUC startup if my Synology NAS is not switched on at NUC startup.

Sure, there is a timeout, but ISTR it may a default of 90/180(?) seconds. I thought in Kodi 19 the default was shortened, or perhaps a setting in the advancedsettings.xml would help.
It's a bit of a 1st World Problem, having to turn on your NAS first.
I thought there was a Wake-on-LAN option somewhere in LibreELEC (I've never had to use it).

(2021-04-20, 12:37)Klojum Wrote: [ -> ]Kodi uses its own instance of ffmpeg, so uninstalling/reinstalling will not make much of a dent in the solutions.

Thanks for the info. And as far as i know, Kodi also uses its own NFS-Client. So its not useful to change something with the Lubuntu-NFS-Client, right?
So it seems there is some problem with the NFS Server. My NFS-server runs as NFSv2/3-server. Do i need a NFSv4-server? In the Kodi-Wiki i can't find a hint to it.
Is it possible to change settings in the Kodi-integrated NFS-client? I think not? Or is it possible do test the connection inside Kodi somehow?

(2021-04-21, 20:26)contadino Wrote: [ -> ]My NFS-server runs as NFSv2/3-server. Do i need a NFSv4-server?

How old that server? AFAIK, Ubuntu (thus, also Lubuntu?!?) as a NFS client already supports NFS v4.0.

Of course Lubuntu supports NFSv4.
But to use NFSv4 it seems to be necessary to change the /etc/exports and to mount the folders you want to share to another point. Following i have to re-import all sources in Kodi, which i want to avoid.

Well, i mounted the shared folder for test purpose now manually at the client. (Still NFSv2/3...)
The manually mounted mkv does not make any playback problems. The same file integrated directly into Kodi still stutters like hell.
So it seems libnfs causes the problem.
Is there a chance, that somehow is interested in fixing that problem?

I really don't want to rescrape all sources into Kodi, because i will loose all infos, which media i allready watched or not...

In case somebody has similar problems:

Today i made an upgrade on my server from Lubuntu 20.10 to 21.04. No everything is fine again.
I don't have a clue why, but now it's running like bevor these strange problems.

Thanks a lot for the help here!!