Homatics Box R 4K Plus

What does your device chain look like? Are you sure everything supports TV-led DV? Did you try using player-led DV?

i have a panasonic lz800 im not 100% about , but i think yes, i have tried both “sink led” (tv swtches to 8bit rgb* and source led (ycbr 12bit), both work on android , also if i disable dv in my tv the options disappear so coreelec checks correctly, i tried both hdmi 3 and 1 directly, and dv works when in android 12 or dune media center
i have a bar on hdmi2 but i dont think it affects it q930c

3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Help, support CPM build

Put your movie on a USB drive and play back from there. Any issue?

Please enable AV video timing in kodi component logging and make a log again.

@SMOKINxxJOE Did you already try to disable caching completely in the System menu?

If you have a stable wired 1 Gbit connection to your shares, you don’t need caching. In fact I remember when testing P7 FEL with BDMV, it would also stutter and it was fixed after I disabled caching.

I tried that and the same issue. Only with FEL.

I do have a stable 1gbit connection to my share but turning caching off still doesn’t help.

https://paste.coreelec.org/ChinoFrazier

Please let me know if this is correct.

No, you will need to share a sample to reproduce it local here.

I’ve never given an ISO sample before, but maybe you can try use tsMuxer for that: Releases · justdan96/tsMuxer · GitHub

First you add an Input file (in this case your movie’s mpls playlist file). Select/remove tracks you want to include. Switch to the “Split & cut” tab, and check “Enable cutting”. Set start and end to timestamp you want.

On the bottom “Output” section, select Blu-ray ISO as format then set the file directory you want. Then just click Start muxing. Hope this helps.

Thank you!

I have attached a sample ISO and a video of what happens when trying to FF/RW or resume.
This mainly only happens on ISO. When in MKV, if you try to seek 20-30 seconds, it will start to lag a little but it’s not terrible. In ISO, it be like a black screen slideshow with the video sometimes showing and the audio cutting in and out. If you play the entire ISO without doing a thing, it will play fine.

Please note this is ONLY for ISO DV FEL. ISO DV MEL plays just fine.

I have talked to another person on Reddit who has the exact same issue with ISO FEL on BOTH the Dune HD Homatics Box R 4K Plus and the Dune HD Pro Vision 4K.

https://paste.coreelec.org/ChinoFrazier AV video timing
https://paste.coreelec.org/WonderedAnimated Normal Kodi debug

Sample ISO:

Video:

I have done some tests with your sample on both my Ugoos AM6B+ and the Dune Homatics R 4K plus. I used the same CE21-NG build on both devices and configured them both to not use any caching.

On the Dune, playback is fine when starting from the beginning, but after a seek action, it starts to freeze and stutter. I checked the debug OSD and noticed that before seeking, Kodi’s builtin 8 second buffer stays filled up at 100%. But after seeking, the buffer keeps dropping down to 0% after which a freeze or stutter occurs. The buffer then fills up to about 40 or 50%, but then drops back to 0 again.

Interestingly enough, I see the same behavior on the Ugoos, just a lot less pronounced. On the Ugoos after seeking, the builtin buffer shows continuous drops to around 60% and back up to 100%, which is enough to keep the stutters away.

So although the buffer issue is present on both devices, only the Dune exhibits an actual problem. Maybe the difference is because of the different CPU power of both boxes? Although I did not see any extremely high CPU usage, even after the seek action.

I also tested another P7 FEL movie clip in ISO format that I created earlier, but that one did not exhibit the issue and the internal buffer stayed at 100% even after seeking.

EDIT

It seems to be a more broad issue after all. On the Ugoos, I tested with my P7 FEL rips of Pinocchio (BDMV) and Godzilla Minus One (MKV) and in both cases the buffer stayed at 100% when starting the movie from the beginning and after seeking forward 30 seconds, it started to fall back to 60% for the BDMV movie and about 70-80% for the MKV.

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I would test setting buffer higher on the Dune box and seeing if that helps.

Adaptive readfactor, and set memory size to 256MB.

I’ve tried that and still the same issue. Maybe the Dune HD Box R just doesn’t have enough power for this.

Maybe, but the fact that the builtin 8-second buffer starts to bounce up and down after seeking (even on the Ugoos), while it stays stable at 100% when starting a video from the beginning is still a strange phenomenon.

I will try to see what happens on my Shield 2019 with Kodi for Android. It can process P7 FEL but will ignore the EL and only use RPU data, so maybe there’s a difference there.

I don’t believe Kodi on Android is capable of handling DTDL (image formats or mp4/mkv container). I thought that was CoreElec feature only.

Last thing to try. Keep cache size at 256MB, but instead of Adaptive caching, set to 8x instead. Does that make a difference?

If not, I might just upgrade box to Am6b+ and call it a day. We know it works on there. Maybe the reason it doesn’t work on S905X4 SOC is slower processor constraint, maybe it is a bug in Kodi with Adaptive caching mechanism, but whatever it is, easier to just change HW to solve it.

We know that S904 boxes struggle with VC-1 remuxes. This maybe another quirk between S904 and the faster S922 in Am6b+.

I tried on my shield pro 2019 but i couldn’t get Kodi to trigger DV on ISO. Only on MKV.

Right, it is because Android on Kodi is behind CoreElec in terms of image format playback. That functionality does not exist.

Android on MKV or MP4 will trigger DV, but no FEL obviously. Whether container holds STDL or DTDL video, it is playing back with RPU only (MEL/P8).