[Testing] Kodi 17.0 stable/final available for RetroPie!

PetroRie

For everyone who gets buffer issue in Kodi 17, the old way of solving this doesn't work on Kodi 17. I found the following guide on YouTube and it works. I tested it yesterday:

Rascas

@PetroRie Things like that shouldn't be posted here, because this is a 3rd party addon, which downloads a custom advancedsettings.xml that nobody knows what it does, only if one checks the downloaded file.

The caching parameters in advancedsettings.xml have changed in Kodi 17, maybe that's why "your old way of solving it" doesn't work anymore. Check part 3 till the end of this link for more information:
http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO%3AModify_the_video_cache

Kodi 17 has a 30MB buffer size which is plenty to play at least FullHD, 8 Mbit/s video files from the internet without problems. Also keep in mind that setting cache to 0 (that makes use of the SD card to cache the video file instead of RAM, and that's probably what this video does) is not recommend for flash-based memory devices like Pi , because of the increased wear of the SD Card and if you don't have sufficient free space on the SD Card to store the file in cache, can make it crash and other problems.

PetroRie

@Rascas said in [Testing] Kodi 17 Release Candidate 1 available for RetroPie!:

@PetroRie Things like that shouldn't be posted here, because this is a 3rd party addon, which downloads a custom advancedsettings.xml that nobody knows what it does, only if one checks the download file.

People asked here about the controllers, and other posted how to fix it. I cannot see what is wrong with that, we're not discussing piracy here. Kodi is an additional application which isn't enabled by default in RetroPie. It's not even an official part of RetroPie. So technically when you look at the picture Kodi is a 3rd party software within RetroPie.

Reason why I posted it here is the buffering was driving me crazy, I never had this with the previous version of Kodi. So I thought there might be other guys having the same problem as I did, so I posted the solution here. I mean buffering can ruin your entire Kodi experience lol.

Yeah it downloads a advancedsettings.xml, but stop pretending like people are downloading some kind of malware. It just has different settings that's it. Nothing to worry about lol.

30MB buffer size was not enough for me, my DL speed on Wifi is 4MB per seconds, wired it's 15-18MB per second. On Kodi 16 I was hooked trough Wifi and with the custom settings I did not have any buffering issues. On Kodi 17 I had buffering issues even while on cable.

This is the XML file:

Rascas

@PetroRie Buffer memory size has nothing to do with internet speed, the buffer fills at same speed, independent if memorysize is 30, 0 or whatever in the same connection. The only thing that can occur is if you are watching an internet video of very high quality, like more than 10mbits, and this are at around 10 GBs in size for h264, 2:30 hours of video, the buffer is not enough to store the needed data and the playback may pause. The only addons that I am aware off that you can find videos with such quality, are torrents.
I don't have any kinds of buffering problems, so I wonder what was yours exactly.

The problem with setting 0 for cache were already mentioned, and I as a developer of another RPi OS and Kodi packager, have already seen many people with problems with that, and lost some time helping others and trying to figure what was the problem in the first place, hence the warning above.

PetroRie

@Rascas said in [Testing] Kodi 17 Release Candidate 1 available for RetroPie!:

I don't have any kinds of buffering problems, so I wonder what was yours exactly.

Normally when you open a stream in Kodi you will see the "grey" bar in the time position slider. It loaded until a certain point and then it stopped and I got the buffering problem. The video I posted solved this for me, now the entire movie loads, no more buffering. I do however watch streams in 1080p. I still have 9GB free space on my 64GB SD card.

Correct me if I'm wrong. If a server has a low speed, wouldn't that cause a buffer problem? Like it loads the movie very slow and you'll hit that point where it stopped loading?

I said already before even on the older versions people had these problems. How would you fix them? What do you recommend? I'm really curious now. Because if the 0 for cache would cause problems on the long term it's just a temporary "fix??" until other problems occur.

Rascas

@PetroRie said in [Testing] Kodi 17 Release Candidate 1 available for RetroPie!:

Correct me if I'm wrong. If a server has a low speed, wouldn't that cause a buffer problem? Like it loads the movie very slow and you'll hit that point where it stopped loading?

If the server has not the speed to stream one video properly, it will always be a problem. You can always do pause, and wait a little for the cache to fill, and then play. In my case I just find another one better.

@PetroRie said in [Testing] Kodi 17 Release Candidate 1 available for RetroPie!:

I said already before even on the older versions people had these problems. How would you fix them? What do you recommend? I'm really curious now. Because if the 0 for cache would cause problems on the long term it's just a temporary "fix??" until other problems occur.

If a server is slow, it will always be slow independant of the memorysize. When this happens I just choose another source.

If you have a good SD card and lots of free space, there shouldn't be a problem in setting the buffer in the SD Card (memorysize=0) besides the increased wear level.

The problem is that many people doesn't have this, and I believe that many new SD cards, specially new UHS ones cause problems, not at first, but when you start to write big quantities of data.

BuZz

@PetroRie of course kodi is an official part of retropie. As much as anything else is anyway. We don't preinstall lots of packages by default to keep the image size down. It's designed to be modular so people can install or remove what they want.

alrdtakn1

I am running 4.1 image of retropie on a pi 3, kodi 17 release. I just got my joystick (dragon rise usb) and controller(snes USB ganepad) to be recognized in kodi. The controllers work perfectly fine in all my emulators, however, every now and again while in kodi I'll watch the volume go from 100 all the way down to 0. I then have to reboot the entire system, hook up a keyboard and raise the volume with the keyboard. Anybody ever encounter this? It's strange because I don't have any analog sticks setup on this pi build at all. Thanks for any input.

Rascas

@alrdtakn1 Strange. Does it happen even if you aren't touching the joystick/controller ? And yes, it is generally the analog stick which change the volume, so it seems a bug. Open an issue in either the oficial Kodi forum or here:
https://github.com/xbmc/peripheral.joystick/issues
Until the issue isn't solved, you can map a key to rise the volume :P

alrdtakn1

@Rascas thanks for the heads up. I'll look into posting there and report my findings. To answer your question, yest it does happen when the controller and joystick a sitting on the table, nothing touching them at all. This happened on another build I did, same specs but had an Xbox 360 wired controller configured for it reinstalled the joystick tool for kodi and everything is working great so far. However for this build with the issue I never plugged in the 360 controller and it is a fresh build from scratch.

mediamogul

@Rascas said in [Testing] Kodi 17 Release Candidate 1 available for RetroPie!:

And yes, it is generally the analog stick which change the volume, so it seems a bug.

As a possible alternative theory, I've notice that a few of my controllers' analog sticks exhibit bursts of random activity due to uncalibrated deadzones. I assume this type of occurrence would also play havoc with Kodi if the sticks were mapped to volume control.

Rascas

@mediamogul said in [Testing] Kodi 17 Release Candidate 1 available for RetroPie!:

@Rascas said in [Testing] Kodi 17 Release Candidate 1 available for RetroPie!:

And yes, it is generally the analog stick which change the volume, so it seems a bug.

As a possible alternative theory, I've notice that a few of my controllers' analog sticks exhibit bursts of random activity due to uncalibrated deadzones. I assume this type of occurrence would also play havoc with Kodi if the sticks were mapped to volume control.

Ah yes, that could be it, although @alrdtakn1 doesn't have any controller with analog sticks. If you go to System -> System Settings -> Input -> Peripherals, your joysticks will appear and have an option to set the deadzones. Try experimenting with different values.

herb_fargus

@alrdtakn1 it also could be an underlying kernel issue as there are plenty of posts about phantom joystick movements on ES as well

djsly

Hello, is there a way to install the rc3 with the provided instructions / repo ?

Rascas

@djsly Maybe on Monday.

Peter

Hi, thank you for the updated build, I've tried upgrading my Kodi 17 alpha1 originally installed from the same repository on Raspbian Jessie but after the upgrade I was unable to launch Kodi. So I've downgraded back to alpha1 which luckily works fine. So is it possible or are there any extra steps to upgrade from alpha1 to RC and should this build work on Raspbian?

Rascas

@Peter Upgrading from the Alphas to the latest, should work, at least it worked for me. It can be some addon that you have installed. I recommend that you reset your settings, or check your log.
Installing the repo on Raspbian works, but I am not sure if you still have to add some groups to the user who is running Kodi and some udev rules to allow Kodi to do some things like mounting disks and reboot/shutdown.

Peter

@Rascas OK Great. I'll probably try it again with RC3 if there will be a build available or just wait for the final build. Thank you.

dwilder812

I've managed to upgrade to krypton rc-1. how do i get from rc-1 to rc-3? Thank you for your time.

Rascas

You have to wait until it is compiled and uploaded to the repo. When a new version is uploaded the information will be updated. Rc4 is the lattest test version by the way.