[leveller]

For the past few days now Kodi will not play any videos, this is on Debian with Kodi installed from the official Buster/testing repos. Technically I should say that videos sort of play but get stuck on the first frame and no sound is produced. I can skip forwards and backwards but it just gets stuck on whatever frame I skip to. The issue applies to all standard video files and add-ons I've tried with. The problem is unrelated to anything in ~/.kodi as I've tried running with a clean one of those and it makes no difference. Here's a log of me starting Kodi and attempting to play a video:
https://pastebin.com/YBYpkX3q

The problem may have started after doing an apt-get dist-upgrade although I'm not certain about that. So it may be some sort of video driver issue or something, I've tried playing (pretty cluelessly) with video acceleration settings etc but it didn't work. Any ideas?

[Karellen]

Hello leveller

Can you enable debug mode in Settings>System Settings>Logging and reproduce your log which captures the problem. The log you submitted shows nothing of use.

[wsnipex]

Thanks to debian, you are running a completely unsupported build.
1. kodi 17 is not supported with ffmpeg 3.4 and likely to create issues
2. latest stable is 17.5
3. you may or may not run wayland. If you do, there will be no hardware decoding with with any kodi build but current master with wayland support enabled
additionally, you'd need a fixed vaapi driver and libva or you'll get crashes with vaapi decoding

[leveller]

Hello leveller

Can you enable debug mode in Settings>System Settings>Logging and reproduce your log which captures the problem. The log you submitted shows nothing of use.

Yeah sorry, here's the debug log:
https://pastebin.com/yf7T3uQp

Thanks to debian, you are running a completely unsupported build.
1. kodi 17 is not supported with ffmpeg 3.4 and likely to create issues
2. latest stable is 17.5
3. you may or may not run wayland. If you do, there will be no hardware decoding with with any kodi build but current master with wayland support enabled
   additionally, you'd need a fixed vaapi driver and libva or you'll get crashes with vaapi decoding

So are you saying 3.4 is too recent a version of ffmpeg? Latest version of Kodi in the repos is 17.4 which is what I'm running, I'm prepared to try building from source if I have to though. I think I'm running x11, not Wayland, or at least $XDG_SESSION_TYPE is set to "x11" and $WAYLAND_DISPLAY is unset.

[leveller]

I built Kodi from source from the Git master branch and it works. Videos play fine and I've got a newer version of Kodi so I'm happy with that for now.

[fritsch]

Yeah ... distribution just compile test their stuff and don't care a single bit if it also runs ... file a bug with them. Kodi 17 only support ffmpeg 3.1.x

[Thorarin]

Just in case other people have this issue and don't feel up to compiling themselves:

I normally run the Kodi version from http://deb-multimedia.org/ on my Debian testing installation.

Just at this moment, the testing release on that repository is 17.4 and it gave me the same problem OP described.
However, when I installed the unstable version (17.6) various libraries got updated and it worked.

In order for kodi/unstable to install I had to run an "apt install libmariadbclient18/unstable" first, because the version currently in testing was slightly too old.