[alekseyzimin]

Hi,
i recently set up my fire tv stick 4k with kodi 18 RC5.2. Video playback works, inclufing autoframerate and 4k hdr, i had to set audio to be 0.25 sec ahead globally. However , none of my old dvd iso files play. Bluray iso play fine.

Is this a known issue? Should i file a bug report?
Alex

[wrxtasy]

I'd DVD ISO contain interlaced mpeg2, which they often do then there is nothing Kodi can do to help. It's a Amazon deinterlacing issue.
You can try disabling hardware acceleration in Kodi and see if that works, and then pull up the On Screen Video Settings and play around with the deinterlacing options if they show up.

The SPMC 16.x (modded Kodi Jarvis) App will likely play DVD's with mpeg2 content out of the box without fiddling.

[alekseyzimin]

Thank you for your reply.  Yes, SPMC and MrMC play DVD ISOs fine on fire stick 4K. It does look like Amazon deinterlacer does not work on interlaced DVD and Blu-Ray content. Only "Deinterlace" shows up in onscreen menu if I turn off the hardware acceleration, and the playback it very choppy and eventually hangs.

Is there any way to use software deinterlacing in Kodi 18?  I recall there was a decision to get rid of ffmpeg libraries some time in the past.  Now that Android devices are getting faster maybe it is a good idea to bring software deinterlacing into Kodi as an option.  The Channels app for example introduced an option for software deinterlacing into their player and it works quite well on fire stick 4K due to its faster CPU/GPU.

Another solution is of course to get rid of all old interlaced DVD ISOs, but there are some movies that only exist on those now.  One can also rip and re-encode these.

[Jackie78]

Hello,

I find that my Fire TV Stick 4K running the latest official stabe Kodi 17 release often crashes when playing SD TV recordings from DVB-S sources. It used to work on the previous Fire TV stick flawlessly, but not on the 4K.

Any hints about improving stability, is it worth upgrading to the Kodi 18 Beta? What are your experiences?

[wrxtasy]

Is there any way to use software deinterlacing in Kodi 18?  I recall there was a decision to get rid of ffmpeg libraries some time in the past.  Now that Android devices are getting faster maybe it is a good idea to bring software deinterlacing into Kodi as an option.  The Channels app for example introduced an option for software deinterlacing into their player and it works quite well on fire stick 4K due to its faster CPU/GPU.

Yes there is a way to do it and it's actually is pretty simple for Kodi devs to implement, but will very likely be refused by those in charge of the Kodi codebase now and into the future.

mpeg2 HW deinterlacing will remain unsupported by a major group of Android hardware vendors as well going forward.
Kodi devs. refuse to add simple user switching - SW decoding and deinterlacing support, and the finger pointing continues on and on and it's end users who continue to feel the pain going forward.

With the irony being ARM Chipsets are getting more powerful each year and can easily software decode and deinterlace SD mpeg2 (DVD) content.

So it's a no win situation.

Use SPMC or MrMC instead.

You can add you voice to implement such a simple mpeg2 SW/HW switch to Kodi to also enable SW deinterlacing in THIS thread (click)

[alekseyzimin]

Thank you, I posted in the thread you suggested. I am back to using Amazon fire tv 3 with SPMC, where, with some workarounds, nearly everything works and usable. Fire stick 4k is no go with SPMC because many of my Bluray ISOs fail. They also fail on MrMC. I use this setup everywhere except my main 7.1 system, where i have a cheap s905x box with libreelec, where EVERYTHING works, HUGE THANKS to libreelec developers!

[wrxtasy]

And to add even further irony to the equation.

@peak3d's improved software decoding performance very recently in Leia which noticeably benefits ARM Android platforms as well as AML S912 platforms running the (CoreELEC) Kodi Leia Netflix Addon. See HERE
But you have to disable all HW decoding to access it.

The final version of Kodi Leia will be out very shortly and users can test for themselves.

[alekseyzimin]

Wow what a big improvement. From 5 to 50fps in SD video on fire stick 4k! Now it really begs a question. Why not use it? Actually one can set all mpeg2 decoding and deinterlacing to software in Kodi by default. Fire stick 4k and Shield will handle it as well as future arm devices. This looks like an excellent compatibility solution going forward.

[alekseyzimin]

Question.  is it possible to disable hardware decoding for mpeg2 in advancedsettings.xml in fire stick 4K like this:

<advancedsettings>
    <video>
        <mediacodec>
            <!-- -1 is default, 0 is never used this codec, 1 is always use this codec, bypassing blacklist -->
            <usempeg2codec>0</usempeg2codec>
        </mediacodec>
    </video>
</advancedsettings>

[FoxForceFive]

Did a fresh install of the Kodi 18 stable release last night, after the firestick4k updated to the latest Amazon fw.

All the files are playing at correct resolution & frame rate, switching working perfectly now on all my files.

It has sorted out the annoying pause in the audio when resuming after a pause or playing a new show/film from the start, it's now way less than half a second as opposed to a couple of seconds. The audio/video lag now seems to be the same across both stereo & surround sound files too.

I use an SPDIF out from the TV to my AV receiver (as the AV receiver won't do 4K) so my lag will be different to yours, but it's stable at ahead by 0.200s on all files I've tried so far.

Only played a few shows/films, but not noticed the audio dropout yet either. That's not conclusive though, cos it's very random when that audio dropout happens, I haven't found any sort of pattern yet.

[dahyippur]

Ok this is kind of a stretch, but does anyone know a way to use speech to text within kodi on fireOS? If search fields in kodi would pull up the fireOS on-screen keyboard, it would be no problem, but this is not the case. Maybe there is a way to modify this.

[selfcontained]

What is the best way to connect the 2018 model Fire TV Stick 4K to a Seagate external HDD (USB 3.0 for both I/O & power)? I won't be using the Fire TV for streaming at all (the only time I'll connect to the internet is to scrape info when I add new files to the HDD.) I want a simple setup to give to my completely tech-naive sister for her birthday.

Will adding Paragon NTFS/exFAT driver to the FireTV allow it to read/write to a USB-connected HDD?

or will I have to connect a USB HDD to a device that has a built in SMB or NFS server and plug that device into a OTG USB + UGREEN USB/Ethernet dongle.

[LukeHansford]

Hello.

Can I ask what settings you have set in your firestick 4K settings under display and audio.

Also can you detail the settings your using in Kodi 18 final.

I will try and set mine exactly the same.

I want to make sure I have all the settings the best to get the best quality from Kodi.

Thank you

[farhanito]

So excited that I can get Atmos with kodi 18 and this Netflix addon.

Any chance Amazon will add lossless HD audio passthrough capability to this thing?

[LukeHansford]

Are you able to share the exact settings your using on the firestick settings and within Kodi settings?

Thank you