Tag Archives: kodi

Stretch preparations before the freeze

These are the last hours when we can update packages and they migrate to testing after 10 days right before the full freeze on 5 February.

The latest Wireshark upstream version, 2.2.4 has been released on Monday and it is waiting patiently to be part of next Debian stable.

I have just tested the fix for Kodi’s bug preventing playing DVD-s and today it will be fixed in unstable as well.

If you have packages which could be updated to make Stretch even better you can still do it today, but don’t wait too long!

Thanks to everyone working on Debian! Stretch will be awesome! 🙂

FFmpeg and Kodi arrived to jessie-backports!

FFmpeg Kodi Debian JessieDebian has switched to FFmpeg in testing in July but the work on the package did not stop at that point. After careful testing we can now provide official packages for Jessie users through jessie-backports. See installation instructions here. FFmpeg becoming available in jessie-backports also enabled us to provide Kodi from Debian in the same official repository.

Thanks to everyone in the Debian Multimedia Maintainers team, especially Andreas Cadhalpun who is also upstream developer at the FFmpeg project, Reinhard Tartler who maintained FFmpeg then Libav then FFmpeg again in Debian for long years and everyone else I could not name here but helped making this possible!

How to automount optical media on Debian Linux for Kodi – Reblogged from Ddumont’s blog

Hello

This problem has been bugging me for a while: how to setup my Kodi based home cinema to automatically mount an optical media ?

Turns out the solution is quite simple, now that Debian has switched for systemd. Just add the following line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sr0 /media/bluray auto defaults,nofail,x-systemd.automount 0 2

continue reading …

Source: How to automount optical media on Debian Linux for Kodi

Debian is preparing the transition to FFmpeg!

Ending an era of shipping Libav as default the Debian Multimedia Team is working out the last details of switching to FFmpeg. If you would like to read more about the reasons please read the rationale behind the change on the dedicated wiki page. If you feel so be welcome to test the new ffmpeg packages or join the discussion starting here. (Warning, the thread is loooong!)

 

Kodi from Debian

The well known XBMC Media Center has been renamed to Kodi with the 14.0 Helix release and following upstream’s decision the xbmc packages are renamed to kodi as well. Debian ships a slightly changed version of XBMC using the “XBMC from Debian” name and following that tradition ladies and gentlemen let me introduce you “Kodi from Debian”:

Kodi from Debian main screen

Kodi from Debian main screen

As of today Kodi from Debian uses the FFmpeg packages instead of the Libav ones which have been used by XBMC from Debian. The reason for the switch was upstream’s decision of dropping the Libav compatibility code and FFmpeg becoming available again packaged in Debian (thanks to Andreas Cadhalpun). It is worth noting that while upstream Kodi 14.0 downloads and builds FFmpeg 2.4.4 by default, Debian ships FFmpeg 2.5.1 already and FFmpeg under Kodi will be updated independently from Kodi thanks to the packaging mechanism.

The new kodi packages are uploaded to the NEW queue and are waiting for being accepted by the FTP Masters who are busy with preparing Jessie for the release (Many thanks to them for their hard work!), but in the meantime you can install kodi from https://people.debian.org/~rbalint/ppa/xbmc-ffmpeg/.

Happy recovery from the holidays! 🙂

update: I have updated the Kodi version to 14.2 in the xbmc-ffmpeg repository also updating FFmpeg to 2.6.1.
The packages can be used with Jessie, but unstable and experimental repositories also have to be enabled due to some dependencies missing from Jessie but present in unstable/experimental.

update 2: Dominique Dumont wrote a nice how-to about automounting optical media (CD/DVD) using Kodi on Debian.

update 3: Kodi is now available from jessie-backports, testing and unstable. Please use the packages from the official repositories instead of my temporary one which contains outdated packages and will be deleted.

XBMC (from Debian) running on MIPS CI20 dev board

XBMC on CI20 MIPS dev board

Imagination Tech kindly offered many developers (including me) a CI20 development board which let me play with XBMC on it a bit and patching it alive. The OpenGL GUI works smoothly, but video can’t be played due to crashes in FFmpeg/Libav/libva libPVROGL_MESA.so (See bug report here).
The patches needed  are sent to upstream and the latest Debian package already ships them.

Big part of the credits go to Cory Fields who created the first MIPS patches I found and updated for latest XBMC code. Thanks!

update:  Both Kodi 14.0 and XBMC 13.2 crash in libPVROGL_MESA.so which library is closed source thus I can’t debug it further.

update 2:  The crash is fixed in latest beta image from Imagination Tech which makes XBMC from Debian able to play videos using software rendering:
xbmc-mips-sw-render

update 3: Kodi also runs with with the patches sent upstream:

kodi-mips-sw-rendering

update 4: Patches for Kodi have been merged!