Kodi Community Forum

Hi,

i'm using Kodi for quite some time on my Apple TVs now and it usually works great but now i came across a problem i've never seen before (ran Kodi for several years on NVIDIA Shield before):

Some videos are not playing correctly, the start, audio works but the video is not displayed. Most times the TV just remain black, sometimes it's stuck in grey. You can hear audio just fine, so the file itself is played. The same files can be played without any issues on the same Apple TV using the official VLC App from the app store. It's also no exotic format (MKV, H264 MPEG-4 AVC part 10 avc1, 1080p).

I found no helpful error messages anywhere, is there any way to debug this, would love to know why thoose files won't work.

Thanks and kind regards

Jan

Just to add because i forgot to mention:

Running Kodi 19.4 on latest Apple TV 4K with tvOS 15.4.

Is there any chance to enable some more comprehensive/debug logging to get more detailed logs?

(2022-06-03, 15:18)Janosch Wrote: [ -> ]Is there any chance to enable some more comprehensive/debug logging to get more detailed logs?

sure: https://kodi.wiki/view/Log_file

This seems to be related to the VTB hardware accelerated decoder. Once disabled thoose videos do play, but unfortunately the apple tv (4k, second gen) does seem to have enough CPU Power to play them all, some are stuttering badly with software decoder.

Seems there is also already an issue on github for this.

Would be great if this could be fixed.

Just to add: Using kodi 19.4 on tvOS 16.1

Just to add: still no debug log (wiki) file (for reference)

Ok, your're right. Generated a debug log now (yes it's really easy), looks like this is the problem:

2022-11-06 20:49:21.799 T:42794 ERROR <general>: ffmpeg[0x112076400X]: [h264] hardware accelerator failed to decode picture

It might be be same problem reported here (and already fixed in recent ffmpeg versions).

Full debug log available here.

Thank you very much and kind regards

Jan

This ssue has been fixed in Kodi Omega (just installed the nightly of Kodi 21 Alpha), all videos are playing now with hardware acceleration activated. Guess the upgrade to FFMPEG 6 in latest Kodi fixed it.

This really made my day! Great news!