S905x suddenly using SW decoding after a week of HW decoding

Do you have H/W decoding enabled in settings or have you turned it off?

Yes it is enabled:

It doesn’t happen often. My device is always on. Once in awhile, I play something I immediately notice the playback is slow and choppy, I check the details of how it is playing and see that it is doing SW decoding while it is enabled in the settings.

And this is what I see in the player process info screen sometimes when the problem occurs. It can stay without a problem for a week and the next week I play something which does SW decoding. Hardware decoding is switched on.

I went back to release CoreELEC 8.95.0 and did not see the issue where decoding would change from HW>SW appear yet and I played lots of content to test it. Will report when it happens tho.

But if so why it came back in release CoreELEC 8.95.1 while it was fixed in release CoreELEC 8.95.0?

Thx

I am having the exact same issue as facer in 8.95.2 . I didn’t change anything, but now all videos I tried (twitch 1080p60 source, youtube through dash inputstreams) are using the ff-h264(SW) decoder now. All HW-Decoding options are set to “always use”.

Always kodi debug log with video and a/v timing specific debuggung is necessary for fixing issue!

I had the same problem last week. If it happens again, I’ll post the respective log

I know about the debug log but you are writing: debug log with video and a/v timing specific debugging

How does one log with video and a/v timing ?

thx

Specific debugging means which specific info will be included in debug log.

https://discourse.coreelec.org/t/how-to-get-logs-and-upload-them/1431

@afl1 I have a S905X box that I just updated to latest CE (it was running LE7 for ages without a problem). It’s primarily used for IPTV. After a reboot it works fine with h/w acceleration, it can work fine for hours, but then you change a channel and it switches over s/w decoding until the next reboot. I think we need to run in debug log mode long enough to catch the error that causes this problem to happen. Running in debug mode after Kodi can no long use h/w decoding may not help us figure out what is wrong.

Is there a way to get rid of the OSD display while debug logging is on?
If it’s possible, I can try it myself tonight or over the next few days, it seems to reproduce on that box quite consistently. I also have a lepotato and another s905x box, those don’t seem to be affected.

It’s possible through the advancedsettings.xml -> https://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml

Check part 2.1.1

You needn’t run debug mode for long time, you only switch-on it after decoding issue. I need to see if this is caused by instance-guard checking in amlogic decoder.

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Alright, thanks. I think we’ve dealt with this before.
It didn’t reproduce for me today, but I’ll make sure to create a log when it happens.
Just out of curiosity, if it is a problem with the instance-guard, is there a solution?

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For Amlogic we can remove it as there isn’t concurrent playback of two video streams (e.g. PIP).
BTW I pushed patch for avoiding possible issues with instace-guard.

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It just reproduced for me, and here’s the relevant bit from the log:

23:37:55.349 T:3213853552  NOTICE: CVideoPlayerVideo::OpenStream - Creating codec: 27
23:37:55.349 T:3213853552   ERROR: CDVDVideoCodecAmlogic::Open - InstanceGuard locked
23:37:55.349 T:3213853552  NOTICE: CDVDVideoCodecFFmpeg::Open() Using codec: H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10
23:37:55.350 T:3213853552   DEBUG: CDVDVideoCodecFFmpeg - Updated codec: ff-h264
23:37:55.350 T:3213853552   DEBUG: CVideoPlayerVideo::OpenStream - open stream with codec id: 27 fps:25/1 options:02

So if I understand correctly, the change you pushed earlier will prevent this problem from happening again?

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I need complete log to see CE version and error messages! Try to upgrade to 8.95.3 or the latest nightly build.

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Yes, this is an older build, before the change you’ve made to the instanceguard.
I will try the latest over the weekend and see if there are still problems with it.

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H96 Pro here. Same issue since 9.0.3 and nightlies. All videos play with software. Flashing back to 9.0.2 fixes it.

This is not the same problem, open a new thread.

Sorry. I’ve created a new thread: [Solved] H96 Pro Hardware decoding not working with 9.0.3 and above