Artifacts with hardware decoding of HDTV (live or recorded)

[DragonQ]

I haven’t used my ODroid-N2+ to watch live HDTV for a while but with the Euros on, it’s getting a lot of use! I notice that there are a lot of blocking artifacts on the screen during playback, both when playing a recording and watching live. After some of my own debugging these are the facts:

• Both my media server and ODroid-N2+ are connected via gigabit Ethernet.
• The artifacts do NOT appear on the recordings themselves (they play fine on my PC).
• The artifacts DO appear at the same time and place on the video every time (e.g. I see artifacts, then rewind and see exactly the same artifacts again in the same place).
• The artifacts do NOT appear when I disable hardware acceleration (but playback is choppy so this is not a solution).
• The artifacts DO appear in both CoreElec 20 and 21.

So I know it’s not a streaming/network issue and it’s not a continuity error issue with the streams themselves. It must be either dying hardware or a hardware decoding or driver bug on the ODroid-N2+.

Does anyone else have this issue? I’ve attached both debug logs from when I was playing a section of video that artifacts and the sample video (the whole graphic at the bottom artifacts when the on-screen match timer shows 41:06), which is standard UK HDTV: AVC Main@L4, CABAC, 4 ref frames.

glitch.ts (8.8 MB)
kodi.log (55.6 KB)

[saxman]

I can confirm it glitches on n2+ exactly as you said on 41.06. but works fine on my phone and pc.

[Portisch]

Try Amlogic-no, I tried the sample and did not see any issue.

[DragonQ]

Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll try that when I get the chance. The supported device list only has the N2, not the N2+, will it still work? I also assume it requires a from-scratch install rather than an in-place upgrade?

EDIT: Just saw nightlies are only available for Kodi 22, whereas I only recently upgraded my devices to Kodi 21. Not sure I want to upgrade as it might break my shared database.