[Yippee38]

My Intel/NVIDIA HTPC died a little while ago, so I upgraded my hardware to AMD/AMD.  Since then, I've been unable to watch videos in Kodi.  The videos will play fine in VLC, but when I try to play the same video in Kodi, I get the audio, but no video.  If I move the mouse, it leave mouse trails across the screen.  When I say it doesn't play video, I mean the screen doesn't change from the menu screen, but I get the video GUI at the bottom (I'll include a screenshot).

Debug log
Screenshot
Distro and version:  openSUSE Tumbleweed 20240913
Hardware:  x86_64
     CPU:  AMD Ryzen 9 7900 12-Core Processor
     GPU:  AMD Radeon RX 6800, Version: 24.1.3, Video memory: 16384MB
     Free memory:  28481MB
     Screen Resolution:  1920x1080 @ 60.00 Hz - Full screen
Install method:  openSUSE Software Manager (pm2 files)
Kodi build:  21.1.0
Git version:  20240817-20240817-183eb85

I've tested this with the addons directory and userdata directories renamed.  When I started Kodi, it asked if I wanted to enable all of my installed addons, but I selected, "No" to make the test as clean as possible.

Any ideas what I can do to fix this?

[Yippee38]

Since I've gotten no suggestions on this, I decided to uninstall Kodi and all components, and delete the /home/.kodi directory.  Reboot.  Re-install, and reboot again.  The problem remains.

[Neo1973]

Thumbs up for providing a debug log

The problem is that Tumbleweed seems to build Kodi with the system provided FFmpeg and not the one bundled with Kodi. This in itself isn't wrong but can lead to unforeseen issues because of the different build configuration. In this case the h.264 decoder used for software decoding is different from what Kodi uses by default. FFmpeg build by Kodi uses ff-h264 while the Tumbleweed FFmpeg uses libopenh264. And with libopenh264 it somehow doesn't work:

Code:


2024-09-20 17:49:23.659 T:116753 debug <general>: ffmpeg[0x556190d14fd0]: [libopenh264] [OpenH264] this = 0x0x7f21a40b8e80, Warning:referencing pictures lost due frame gaps exist, prev_frame_num: 5, curr_frame_num: 8
2024-09-20 17:49:23.659 T:116753 error <general>: ffmpeg[0x556190d14fd0]: [libopenh264] DecodeFrame failed


Try enabling hardware accelerated decoding with VAAPI in Settings/Player/Videos, maybe that already is enough.

Side note: You said this is your HTPC, if its only use if for Kodi then you probably want to run it with GBM instead of X11.

[Yippee38]

Thank you so much!

You comment led me to this thread on the openSUSE forums.  I discovered from that, that I had to switch the video codecs from installing from the openSUSE repositories to the Packman repositories.  The command - I found in that thread - that worked for me was:
sudo zypper dup --allow-vendor-change --from packman
But, in my case, my packman repository isn't named "packman", but "Packman Repository".  So my command looked like this:
sudo zypper dup --allow-vendor-change --from 'Packman Repository'

I hope this helps somebody else if they run into this problem.