[jonathan.holvey]

Hi,

I'm trying to fix an issue I've been seeing for quite a while, where Kodi will leak memory while playing live TV (via TVheadend). Disabling hardware decoding in Kodi's settings will work around the issue, but my CPU isn't up to the task of decoding HD TV streams.

I've sought help here, in the TVheadend section of the forum, and on the TVheadend forum. There it was suggested that I try an updated graphics driver from an unofficial PPA, however this driver turned out to have it's own issues, where Kodi would just quit after a couple of minutes of playback.

I've been able to reproduce the issue using the same setup on another computer, with a similar AMD graphics card.

What should I try next?

My setup is:
Ubuntu 16.04
Kernel 4.4.0 (or 4.10.0)
Kodi 17.6
TVheadend 4.2.5
AMD Radeon HD6450 (or HD6250)

Kodi's player information says:
Video decoder: ff-h264-vdpau (HW)
Pixel format: vdpau
Deinterlace method: vdpau-temp
Video stream: 1,920x1,080 px, 1.78 AR, 25.000 FPS
Audio stream: FL,FR, mp2, 16 bits, 48,000 Hz

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=322181
https://tvheadend.org/boards/14/topics/29949

Cheers,
Jon

[Klojum]

What should I try next?

AMD doesn't have the best of track records for years, as far as graphics drivers are concerned. You could find a simple discrete GPU from the green camp (=Nvidia, GT520/610 or a modern GT1030 [8bit video only for Nvidia in Linux!]).
For videos with a maximum of 1080p resolution and h264 format (or HEVC with a limited bitrate), a simple Raspberry Pi 3 running LibreELEC can also help you out there.

[fritsch]

Upgrade mesa, please and use kodi v18.

[jonathan.holvey]

Upgrade mesa, please and use kodi v18.

Thanks for the tip. Upgrading from the official (I think) ubuntu-x-swat/updates PPA seems to have fixed the problem. This will certainly hold me over until Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is released later this year.

Upgrading to a nightly build of Kodi 18 didn't make a difference.

Thanks again! This has been bothering me for months.

[fritsch]

Yeah - was a one liner fix in mesa-vdpau-drivers :-)