Retropie & Kodi - x265 movies crash

praefectum

Hello everyone,

I'm totally new to Retropie and therefore I first want to thank everyone for creating this awesome piece of software.

I just upgraded my Pi based media center to a RPi4 in order to enjoy HW compatibility with x265 movies. While doing that I decided to try Retropie to combine some retrogaming in one system.
Unfortunately x265 files make Kodi (installed from retropie-setup, version 18.6) immediately crash and restart.

Does anyone know if it's a known bug? I couldn't find any info about that.
I filled in below the info I could from the instruction post.

Thank you very much t everone!
Marco

Pi Model or other hardware: RPi 4 4GB
Power Supply used: Raspberry foundation original and several others non original
RetroPie Version Used: 4.6
Built From: Pre made SD Image on RetroPie website
USB Devices connected: None
Controller used: PS3 Sixaxis
Error messages received: Kodi restarting
Log from /home/pi: https://pastebin.com/JJ28yC9W

Rascas

@praefectum Not enough GPU memory! Don't change the 320Mb default setting, that's the recommemded for the RPi 4.

mitu

@Rascas By default, I don't think it's 320Mb. Without any gpu_mem settings, I get

vcgencmd get_mem gpu
gpu=76M

Rascas

@mitu By default, in Retropie. Kodi on Pi 4 is long known to require more than 256Mb for h265 and 320Mb is the recommended.

mitu

@Rascas Thanks for the pointer.

For Mesa/RPI4 we don't set the gpu_mem by default, since it was mainly needed for EmulationStation when using the legacy BRCM drivers.

I guess we should document that - I remember testing 4k video with Kodi (without HEVC) and it needed at least gpu_mem=256. Would that be accurate ?

Rascas

@mitu Some 4K h265 may require more than 256Mb so the recommended is now 320Mb.
In the future, for Kodi 19 with v4l2, 76Mb will be the default for the RPi 4 at least since v4l2 decoders use the CMA memory allocation. It is not known yet if older Pi models will use v4l2 in Kodi 19, probably not yet.

praefectum

Hi! Thanks for the feedback.
Just one info: I didn't change anything in the configuration files, just installed Kodi from retropie-setup and imported my media library, that's all.

praefectum

Just to close the issue: I've set gpu_mem at 320 Mb via raspi-config and now everything works fine! Thank you very much!