Kodi Community Forum

Platform is Raspberry Pi 4 with LibreELEC 10 (Kodi 19). It reproduces 100%. With DRM Prime enabled, on any 4k video which is encoded in AVC (H.264) there's no image, only sound. With the option off, the video plays fine but with dropped frames. I tried with Kodi 18 and with MMAL on the video plays but again with dropped frames. Test sample used: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwxFVkl...rWE1N9M1rQ

This is a full log with a clean LibreELEC install: https://zerobin.net/?d48e3bfab286a906#4r...Oun2EzrLA8=

(2022-02-21, 12:19)gn77b Wrote: [ -> ]Platform is Raspberry Pi 4 with LibreELEC 10 (Kodi 19).

The problem is the combo of the RPi4 and the used video format. 4K/h264 is not a widely implemented video standard (it may be popular in the anime world, but that's it), and not many video cards have hardware-acceleration built in for that format. Hence with that disabled, the slowish RPi4 CPU can only do so much.

So either you get some htpc hardware that is more powerful/capable of handling 4K/h264, or you need to convert your videos into 4K/h265-hevc, which much better supported by video cards including the one in the RPi4.

(2022-02-21, 13:27)Klojum Wrote: [ -> ]

(2022-02-21, 12:19)gn77b Wrote: [ -> ]Platform is Raspberry Pi 4 with LibreELEC 10 (Kodi 19).

The problem is the combo of the RPi4 and the used video format. 4K/h264 is not a widely implemented video standard (it may be popular in the anime world, but that's it), and not many video cards have hardware-acceleration built in for that format. Hence with that disabled, the slowish RPi4 CPU can only do so much.

So either you get some htpc hardware that is more powerful/capable of handling 4K/h264, or you need to convert your videos into 4K/h265-hevc, which much better supported by video cards including the one in the RPi4.

I see. I noticed 4k/h264 is pretty rare but I ran into more files in this format recently. So you're saying that the RPi4 isn't capable of hardware decoding 4k/h264 or support for it isn't implemented on Kodi's side because it's not a popular format?

(2022-02-21, 14:20)gn77b Wrote: [ -> ]So you're saying that the RPi4 isn't capable of hardware decoding 4k/h264 or support for it isn't implemented on Kodi's side because it's not a popular format?

It's not just that the video decoding is not implemented in Kodi's video engine ffmpeg, but this specific video decoding is not supported by the hardware (in your case, the RPi4). Again, a htpc with enough grunt will overcome this and decode these videos okay via software (=CPU) decoding.

As you yourself said. "I noticed 4k/h264 is pretty rare".

I get it, thanks. Any recommendations for HTPCs that can decode this (or pretty much everything) in SW?

I don't know why I added "in SW" at the end I meant HTPCs that can decode everything and I don't care how.