[nickpeirson]

I've been using Kodi (or XBMC as it was then) since it was on the original xbox so firstly thanks for the excellent software you guys have been providing for years. Recently I've been running it on a Windows machine, but it's the only windows device in the house (everything else is FreeBSD, OSX or Linux) so I'm moving it over to a Linux PC as I find maintaining windows hard work.

Everything seems to be working apart from software rendering. I tried playing a Hi10p file and got no audio or video output, just a black screen. Hitting O brought up stats, and I could pause playback, so Kodi hadn't hung, just no output. I'm on an old Radeon HD 6450 so I understood it's not going to be decoded in HW, but I'd expect a stuttering playback if it was the CPU being underpowered to do the SW decoding. As a test I turned off VDPAU HW acceleration and tried playing a file that worked with it enabled (i.e. one that was supported by HW acceleration) and got the same result, no audio or video, so it looks like software rendering is dead for some reason.

I'm running Kodi 17-rc2 on Ubuntu 16.04.1 and the graphics card is the aforementioned Radeon HD 6450. I've uploaded a debug log to pastebin for the playback of the Hi10p file. I can add another debug log for the none Hi10p file if that would be useful and let me know if I can provide any more information on hardware setup, installed packages, package versions, etc.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

[fritsch]

18:08:31.917 T:140218284140928 DEBUG: GL: Requested render method: 5
18:08:31.917 T:140218284140928 ERROR: GL: Shaders support not present
18:08:31.917 T:140218284140928 NOTICE: GL: NPOT texture support detected
18:08:31.917 T:140218284140928 NOTICE: GL: Using GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object
18:08:31.960 T:140218284140928 DEBUG: GL: Requested render method: 5
18:08:31.960 T:140218284140928 ERROR: GL: Shaders support not present
18:08:31.960 T:140218284140928 NOTICE: GL: NPOT texture support detected
18:08:31.960 T:140218284140928 NOTICE: GL: Using GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object
18:08:32.000 T:140218284140928 DEBUG: GL: Requested render method: 5
18:08:32.000 T:140218284140928 ERROR: GL: Shaders support not present
18:08:32.000 T:140218284140928 NOTICE: GL: NPOT texture support detected
18:08:32.000 T:140218284140928 NOTICE: GL: Using GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object
18:08:32.038 T:140216421562112 DEBUG: CVideoPlayerVideo::CalcDropRequirement - hurry: 0
18:08:32.044 T:140218284140928 DEBUG: GL: Requested render method: 5
18:08:32.044 T:140218284140928 ERROR: GL: Shaders support not present

Problem with your drivers. Broken mesa or something.

[FernetMenta]

btw: there is no software rendering on Linux, only sw decoding.

[nickpeirson]

Thanks for the quick replies.

@fritsch:
Based on that I did some general good practice things like update all of the mesa related packages on the system:

Code:

sudo apt-get install $(dpkg -l | grep mesa | awk '{print $2}')

Following that I'm still seeing the same lines in the logs. This is the first time I've had anything to do with mesa so I don't know how to debug, and google didn't turn up anything that looked useful to me based on the log lines you identified as showing the issue.

I did notice that there's an option to use GLSL instead of ARB in Settings -> Player Settings -> Video and as the error in the lines you highlighted came after a notice about using ARB I thought it was worth a go to switch it over to GLSL. That seems to have solved the problem as I'm now getting audio and video!

No idea what ARB and GLSL is, but thanks very much for giving me enough of a pointer to be able to do try something useful. I assume ARB should also be working? I'm happy to stick with GLSL as it seems to fix the problem, but if there's value in me debugging ARB I'm happy to help.

@FernetMenta:
Thanks for the info. I know just enough about video decoding and rendering to be able to ask mostly the right questions, definitely not an expert in the area by any means!

[FernetMenta]

Don't get me wrong, I just posted this in order to have less confusion. We had software rendering but removed it onLinux. Advanced shaders (GLSL) is the default anyway and ARB the fallback. If there is still a chance to select ARM, that should be removed from the settings. I will do thanks!