Description of problem: While testing the last update of the tainted version of Kodi, I discovered that the video of mp4 files was no longer being displayed. Audio is there, and the position bar with the stop icon, but the video of the file is just a black screen. The same is true when I attempt to watch IPTV channels - audio, but a black screen for video. The same video files play OK in vlc, and while I have far from mastered the art of running iptv with vlc, the channels I did get to work all showed video. Hardware involved: MGA9-64 Plasma on a desktop computer with an ASRock A790GXH/128M motherboard, Phenom II X4 910 processor, AMD HD 8490 (Caicos) GPU, Dell E198FP monitor. Another system with very different hardware - Asus Prime Q270M/C motherboard, i5-7500 processor, Nvidia Quadro K620 GPU(using nvidia-current), and Acer R240HY monitor - does not have the issue. The involved system was upgraded from Mageia 8 in early October, and at that time Kodi was working OK. Thinking the problem might be from something left from that upgrade, this afternoon I made a clean install of MGA9 Plasma on the system, using the netinstall iso, so it got all the latest updates. It still has the issue.
Created attachment 14414 [details] Log of a session where videos and iptv channels did not display
Created attachment 14415 [details] Log of a session where two files and two iptv channels played video OK
New test system: MGA9-64 Plasma on an HP Pavilion 15, AMD A8-4555 APU with HD7600G graphics (radeon driver). Before today, this system had never had Kodi installed. I installed the tainted 20.1 version of Kodi, but not the iptvsimple add-on. Then I ran Kodi and tried to play some video files. This system happens to have a variety of files, with Kodi showing a variety of codecs: one AV1, one AV9, one h.265, and several h.264. The videos on the other AMD system are all h.264. All of the h.264 files showed the black screen for video, and all of the others played perfectly. After updating to the tainted 20.2, no change. So it would appear that we have a problem with Kodi's handling of the h.264 codec with Radeon GPUs. VLC plays all of the videos, as does parole. BTW, all of the tainted x264/h.264 packages are installed, except for the devel libraries.
MGA9-64 Plasma on HP Probook 6550b, i3 M350, "Mesa Intel HD graphics." Installed the current tainted Kodi, and all videos play properly. One more GPU option to try, an AMD HD 8570 "Oland" that uses the amdgpu driver.
MGA9-64 Plasma, Core2Quad, AMD HD 8570 (Oland) graphics, using the amdgpu driver. All of the videos play OK in Kodi on this system. In fact, while vlc objects to the subtitle format in some of them (but plays them without subtitles anyway) Kodi shows the subtitles with no objection. So that narrows it down to the interaction with the radeon driver. Has there been a change in the driver or firmware that could cause this? Or is it just too old? Sigh. I find it disappointing that Kodi won't work correctly with an AMD card from 2013 and an APU from 2015, yet works just fine with Intel graphics on a 2010 laptop.
Thanks for this awesome testing, TJ. Could you go in to the Settings and change the video settings? VDPAU or VAAPI or None and see if that changes anything? It may be hidden behind "Advanced" somewhere...
Took me a while to find it, but that seems to take care of it in the original system. When I finally found the setting, VAAPI was turned on. Switching it off let stuff play, both in videos and iptv. The setting description said it's used mostly for Intel, but also for some AMD gpus. They must have changed the defaults on me. I wonder, how do they choose what to make the default? Could it be that if the radeon driver is being used the default ought to be VAAPI disabled, but if amdgpu, VAAPI enabled? Is that even possible?
Works on the HP Pavilion laptop, too.
Thomas Install libva-utils and vdpauinfo Run vainfo and vdpauinfo , check if complain about something For me the first it was complaining about libvdpau_radeonsi.so.1 , with urpmf I found that I need lib64vdpau-driver-radeonsi , of course what works for me not necessary works for you
(In reply to Thomas Andrews from comment #7) > Took me a while to find it, but that seems to take care of it in the original > system. When I finally found the setting, VAAPI was turned on. Switching it > off let stuff play, both in videos and iptv. > The setting description said it's used mostly for Intel, but also for some > AMD gpus. They must have changed the defaults on me. This is great news. I'm running Cauldron and didn't have Kodi available to be able to tell you exactly where the Settings option would be. > I wonder, how do they choose what to make the default? Could it be that if > the radeon driver is being used the default ought to be VAAPI disabled, but > if amdgpu, VAAPI enabled? Is that even possible? During configuration, no. It must be done, I believe, in the code. TJ, do you consider this issue resolved?
I guess so. But I wonder about future updates breaking Kodi for some users. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing what happened here is this: Between Kodi 19.x and 20.x, the form of the configuration file was changed(at least some of the defaults). Kodi 20 could use a Kodi 19 config file, but when it is closed the config file is "updated" to the new format. Any of the settings that used the Kodi 19 defaults would still use defaults, but they would be the new Kodi 20 defaults. When I tested the core version of Kodi 20.2 in October, I had just done an upgrade install of Mageia 9 using the mgaapplet, which upgraded Kodi 19.x to 20.1. I may have run the new Kodi 20.1, but I can't remember now. If I didn't, and simply ran the 20.2 update, it would have used the old 19.x config file, worked OK, but then rewrote the file when it was closed. I didn't run Kodi again until I was reminded that there was a tainted version that we had not pushed with the core version. When I went to test that, I ran it with the new config file, with the new defaults, and it didn't work. Does any of that make sense? I'm hoping that when the next update comes along, Kodi doesn't touch any of the non-default settings the user has made, but we'll need to check on it. There probably isn't any way to prevent the Kodi folks from changing the defaults from one version to another, but perhaps we ought to somehow warn our users that it MIGHT happen. Then again, I could be all wet. What do you think?
(In reply to katnatek from comment #9) > Thomas > Install libva-utils and vdpauinfo > > Run vainfo and vdpauinfo , check if complain about something > > For me the first it was complaining about libvdpau_radeonsi.so.1 , with > urpmf I found that I need lib64vdpau-driver-radeonsi , of course what works > for me not necessary works for you If I recall correctly, your AMD GPU is one of the GCN1 chips that needs the amdgpu driver in Mageia. My HD 8570 is one of those, and it's has no trouble with Kodi, so far. (comment 5) The two GPUs that are troublesome for me are earlier Terascale chips that need the radeon driver. They won't work with amdgpu. I suspect that either those chips don't have hardware decoding of h.264, or that the radeon driver doesn't support it. Disabling the default hardware decoding seems to let it work. However, I will give your suggestion a try later today and see what happens. Even if it doesn't help my situation, it apparently was necessary for yours. @Stig: Do we need to add a new dependency?
It makes perfect sense and I, too, believe that between v19 and v20 there would be some kind of changes in the config, though I have no idea what, where and when... OTOH, how many people are using Kodi on older hardware? The Kodi devs are very conservative when it comes to a released version and somewhat progressive during development, so changes to the config would be expected. How to "warn" users about it, I have no idea.
(In reply to Thomas Andrews from comment #12) > Even if it doesn't help my situation, it apparently was necessary for yours. > @Stig: Do we need to add a new dependency? I've added a Build dependencies on VDPAU and VAAPI in the latest update in updates_testing in bug 32889.
Hmmm. Looks like mine needs lib64vdpau-driver-r600. There's a core version and a tainted version. I installed the tainted version. However, it made no difference. My Kodi video player settings don't offer any choices for VDPAU, only VAAPI. Enabling VAAPI acceleration is as before. "Expert" mode allows me to choose which forms use acceleration, and I probably could play with them, but disabling works, too.
Research indicates that some older AMD GPUs can use VPDPAU, but sometimes they must be set up manually. That is beyond the scope of this bug, so since Kodi *can* be set so that H.264 video will play on the hardware, and since a new update for Kodi is in the pipeline, I'm closing this bug as "WORKSFORME."
Resolution: (none) => WORKSFORMEStatus: NEW => RESOLVED