Pi3: The Do's and Dont's!

[ScottBouch 3]

So, I had a bit of a trial... My wife has friends coming over, and had promised a "Cinema Night", however I have recently been trying to improve my client attached to the projector. It's a Raspberry Pi 3.

I managed to get it working 1 hour before they arrived after spending all day trying to find a solution that worked.

Fail 1: OSMC with EmbyCon addon - Would only play the first 7 ot 8 seconds of any video then grind to a halt. OK for 7 second movies, useless for anything else. Details here

Fail 2: Emby Theatre - No matter what settings I tried (I systematically tried everything) the frame rate was just too slow, and lip sync miles out - unwatchable. Details here

Success! Libreelec (9.2.8) with EmbyCon addon (1.0.6) - bit of a faff to get the system clock set up (as could not add remote directory to download the add-on until the clock was working) but it now plays lovely! Hooray!!! Wish I'd tried this first......

Hope this helps others save to a day of ball-ache.

Cheers, Scott.

Edited January 8, 2022 by ScottBouch

[ScottBouch 3]

Bit of further info regarding setting up the system clock with Libreelec on the Raspberry PI3. I have had this issue countless times with various flavours of Kodi install for Raspberry Pi (OSMC and Libreelec [and also the old Plex client in those pre-Emby days]) over the years.

First clue is not being able to make network connections - take a glance at the system clock, if it's out, you won't be able to make a network connection. There are many websites that list common issues with regarding Kodi, but none of them relate to getting the system clock right first.

Solution:

• Set the correct region
• Add three timeservers, the below works for me in the UK:
  • 0.pool.ntp.org
  • 1.pool.ntp.org
  • 2.pool.ntp.org
• Select the "don't start Kodi until a network connection is established", and I set the timeout to 60 seconds to allow it plenty long enough to pick up.
• Reboot

This then gives me flawless operation after subsequent reboots.

Cheers, Scott

Edited January 10, 2022 by ScottBouch

[TeamB 2352]

In all my years of playing with R Pi devices and having 4 in my home acting as media players and another 3 running as data loggers for things like temperature, power usage and environmental monitoring etc i have never seen this issue. I am using a mixture of wired and wifi and have never had to set the region before the network would connect.

It might not be a pi issue but something related to your network, as you said there does not appear to be anyone else having this issue.

Anyway glad you got it working.