Lossless audio with Odroid C2 and Libreelec

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For several years I have been running Kodi on a Raspberry Pi. It started with Openelec, followed by LibreELEC, using a Raspberry Pi 1, 2 and finally 3. Every time I upgraded the Raspberry Pi that runs my home server, I took the replaced Raspberry to run Kodi with LibreELEC. To be able to watch MPEG-2 from DVDs, I bought the license from the RP Foundation. Over the years I switched from DVD to BlueRay, and with that the quality of the picture and sound changed.

The sound formats you get on BlueRay made me switch and replace the Raspberry by a Odroid C2. Depending on the BlueRay movie, you get DTS, True-HD and Atmos. To be able to listen to DTS or Atmos, you need an audio receiver supporting the format. Kodi can pass through the audio channels to your receiver (AVR). Decoding the bit stream is then a task of the AVR. In case the audio signaled received is valid, AVR will show the correct audio format (DTS, Atmos) or PCM. PCM means: it did not work, information is missing and the AVR is not able to understand the received audio format.

The sound is transported together with the video signal through HDMI. Raspberry Pi supports HDMI rev 1.3. This is just not enough for transporting high quality audio with several channels. Because of this limitation, not all channels are transmitted, and the audio receiver is PCM, but not DTS or Atmos any longer. Odroid C2 offers HDMI rev 2.0, meaning you get 4k at 60Hz and enough bandwidth to support high quality Audio. It comes with more RAM and faster LAN too, so the streaming and user experience is better.

The main plus point is that it’s HDMI can pass through high quality audio. Kodi playing a track with 7.1.2 Atmos? Information on whether it will actually work is not easy to find. Some posts say yes, others no. It seems that it wasn’t working a few years back, but today it is working. For testing, Kodi provides a library with sample files. From there you can download official Atmos content. Another site with many samples is the digital theater.

I’ll use the conductor sample: TrueHD 7.1 Atmos.

Configuration

Pictures are in German, but you should be able to find them in Kodi.

  • Go to Settings > System > Audio
  • Audio output over HDMI and 7.1 channels.
  • Allow pass through
  • Activate codecs your AVR supports. Mine supports AC3, E-AC3 (Atmos), DTS, True-HD.

Test

Start the conductor sample for testing the Atmos sound.

Soundbar shows correctly that Dolby Atmos sound is received.

Playing a DTS sample, soundbar shows correctly that DTS sound is received.

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Small Wishlist for SAPPHIRE

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SAP’S prime event SAPPHIRE is happening next week. Of course SAP will talk about how great they are, how latest acquisitions add value, the new additions to the excellent portfolio, that customers are doing great thanks to SAP, and so on. It’s an event driven by marketing and sales, what else to expect?

Personally, I’d like to see some announcements that won’t happen, and won’t be announced at any other SAP event. Nevertheless, here is my personal list of things that I believe could add value to SAP’s overall ecosystem.

Trackable announcements

As with every event, there will be a lot of success stories and product launches and should padding and everybody on stage is either a friend, longtime friend, or for companies, it’s a very special relationship. And all about how great the product is. Why not make it easy to track the success? Of course S/4 is big. What about the other announcements? If it’s announced, provide a way to see how well the product is performing. Make transparent what happens to the product after SAPPHIRE is over. Bring the customer back on stage. Let them talk about the last 2, 3 or 5 years. For instance, what happened to the Leonardo solution for analyzing the health of palm trees? Is the intelligent vending machine used in the market? How is the cloud service for tax calculation performing?

Bring back apps

SAP is really good in delivering solutions for core business processes. For the additional problems, SAP tries to offer tools to customers that make it possible to create missing solutions and apps. What a customer gets is a toolset to develop, not a solution. If you want to have a mobile app for “standard” functionality today, you have to develop it. For large companies this is not a problem, for smaller one it can be, for everyone it means that they are responsible for developing apps. And to support them.

Once we had mobile workflow from Sybase / SAP, a packaged app for mobile. Afaria was a leader in MDM. Both were sold together and client got for one price a complete mobile solution. Today you can automatically create an offline enabled app using for instance mobile cards or the new mobile development kit. Using these, you develop following standard guidelines. Every partner or freelancer can offer the very same app for a customer.

The available toolset is good enough to create apps out of Fiori apps, Mobile Cards or Mobile Development Kit. Many customers want the apps you can develop with these but do not like the idea of doing this. And having to deal with all the licensing and support issues. Make it easy to offer the developed app as an app with all licensing included. SAP could provide the standard documentation on how to create an app for a given process using the toolset from SAP, and let partners either create apps following 100% these guidelines or let them add additional features. In both cases, customer can buy what is needed, with full support from partner and SAP, and without having to license all components involved. In case customer wants to change the partner, the app is build using standard recommendation, another partner can offer the exact same app.

Redefine SAP portfolio

Trusting partners to deliver the kind of apps as they were delivered by SAP means to rethink SAP Consulting positioning and its portfolio. Once SAP Consulting was a powerful organization with competent people helping customers. From technical side, the good consultants largely left. From a functional point, situation is much better. Would be nice to see SAP consulting focusing solely where it can still offer value to customers: functional consulting. Let SAP’s own consultants advice customers on how to improve their business processes. How to do accounting using S/4, Retail or supplier management. Let everything that even slightly touches technical area complete handled by either a partner or freelancer consultant. Same for support. It’s time to stop letting SAP support people act as consultants.

Simplify Cloud

When SAP executives look at it, it must be a dream for them: customers buying HEC, cloud numbers go up, only good feedback. What enters the system and bubbles up is filtered. The lower you go at a HEC project, talking to people actually working on a daily basis with HEC, situation changes: System not correctly configured, unavailability, bad support, and so on.

Personally I had so far: HANA system that wasn’t updated for years, Gateway system with language pack not correctly installed, systems unavailable because support restarted it in PRD without informing anyone, missing components like Web Dispatcher. My personal favorite: 24/7 support from Monday to Friday during Indian business hours.

It’s time to announce when SAP is either closing HEC or restarting it’s offering. Same for SCP. Neo, Cloud Foundry, it’s nice to have choice, but please close one. Announce if Neo is going to survive or not, and give a final date. Also, separate SCP services by user groups: developers & business. Business side is interested in solutions not developer services. Give each group one view at SCP and services. A possible end of this could be to close the developer part of SCP. Bring the tools to multi cloud, aka: offer them on AWS, Azure, etc.

Fiori

SAP pushed Design Thinking and provides helpful tools and guidance on how to enable it. Many customers started to use DT thanks to SAP. The initiative slowed down. Development on Build and web site seems to be at minimum effort. I would like to see SAP investing more into BUILD. Make all UI5 controls available, integrate Bootstrap controls, include controls for iOS, Android and material design. Make it a design tool not only for SAP content, but for everything. Make it the design and mock tool at companies. To speed adoption of UI5 outside SAP context, make all UI controls part of OpenUI5. Include better support for non-OData backends.

None of this will be announced at SAPPHIRE. I just wrote this down to be able to look back in a few years to see if some ideas were good. There are additional ideas that are more suitable for TechEd, like: make S/4 architecture ready for Kubernetes. Having a work process running as pod in K8S makes it easier to scale an SAP System. Allowing arbitrary databases as backend for SAP CAPM. Add SAP technologies to Swagger (OpenAPI). Deliver software via Git. Long time topic from me, think I mentioned this around 2011 in SCN. For instance, instead of installing Fiori Apps the traditional way, let me select the app in Git and import only this app and run also the included tests. Reduce drastically RAM footprint of HANA. And many more. Maybe I will write a similar blog for next SAP TechEd.

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Odroid C2 running Librelec and Kodi

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Recently I switched from Libreelec and Raspberry Pi to using Libreelec on Odroid C2. In this blog I’ll share more information on the overall setup, configuration and installation.

Setup

Setup is centered around the soundbar. My soundbar is my AVR, supporting DTS and Atmos. Soundbar is connected to the TV via HDMI with ARC. This allows me to watch e.g. Amazon Prime, as well as watching movies from Kodi with sound served from the soundbar. Supporting CEC, my soundbar gets automatically powered on and off together with TV and all devices are controlled by one remote control.

Layout

The overall layout consists of three components: TV, soundbar, Odroid.

  • Kodi sends audio to the DTS / Atmos soundbar via HDMI and pass through.
  • The soundbar plays the sound and forwards the video to the TV.
  • TV and soundbar are connected using HDMI ARC.
  • TV remote control for soundbar volume and Kodi navigation.

Installation

The Odroid C2 comes with a SDCard slot and I reused the SD Card from Raspberry Pi. ODroid C2 can work with a eMMC card, but my SD Card reader in my laptop wasn’t able to recognize the card without errors.

Installation of Libreelec was done using the official installer and image for ODroid available on the project page.

In real live, the connection to the soundbar is simple. Power and HDMI cable, nothing more.

For internet connection, a LAN cable is needed. On the right, the soundbar that acts as audio receiver with DTS and Atmos support.

After connecting power, Libreelec starts and after a few minutes, Kodi is ready.

Internet via LAN is working, 2GB memory is available and Kodi 9.0.1 is running.

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How to add a new disk to RAID5

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I have a RAID5 consisting of three 10TB HDDs. This RAID5 has a total capacity of 20 TB.

I bought a new 10 TB HDD that I want to use to extend the RAID5: 4 HDDs with a total capacity of 30 TB. The file system on md0 is ext4. Currently, the RAID5 disks are sdc1, sdf1 and sde1. The additional disk is sdd1.

cat /proc/mdstat

The RAID5 is formatted with ext4 and available as md0.

mount

Steps

  1. Prepare new disk
  2. Add disk to RAID
  3. Grow RAID
  4. Extend ext4 files system.

Prepare new disk

First start with the preparation of the new disk. The disk is /dev/sdd and needs to have a partition. I use parted for this. First, create a label of type gpt.

parted -s -a optimal /dev/sdd mklabel gpt

Next is to create the partition using parted. This time, I am using the interface.

parted /dev/sdd

Add disk to RAID

The RAID is a software RAID on Linux, therefore mdadm is used to control the raid. To add a new disk, option –add is used and the raid and new disk are passed as parameters.

mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sdd1

The result of the operation can be seen in mdstat.

cat /poc/mdstat

The new disk is added as a spare device. The (S) behind sdd1 means spare device. In case a device would fail, the spare device will take over automatically and a RAID rebuild will be triggered. This gives me less trouble in case a device fails, as I won’t have to do anything, but it won’t give me more space. The RAID5 is still at 20 TB.

Grow RAID

To make the RAID5 aware of the new disk and that it should be used for data storage, the RAID must be informed to use the new HDD using the grow command.

mdadm --grow --raid-devices=4 /dev/md0

The command informs the RAID that there are now 4 HDDs to be used, instead of 3. This command will trigger a RAID rebuild, as the information must be distributed to the HDDs.

This process will take some time. To learn how to increase the speed the sync, see my other blog about this topic.

The RAID5 consists now of 4 HDD, all working [UUUU]. The size of the RAID is still 20 TB. This is because the md0 has capacity of 30 TB, but the ext4 filesystem is still configured to make use of 20 TB.

Resize ext4 filesystem

To be able to use the 30TB available on the RAID5, you need to resize the file system. First, run an integrity check.

e2fsck -f /dev/md0

After the e2fsck ended without errors, the file system can be extended. This is done by using the tool resize2fs.

resize2fs /dev/md0

After resize2fs completes (can take a while), the size available is now 30TB:

mount /dev/md0 /mnt/md0/

Links

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Monitor disk speed in Linux

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Running a server allows you to do a lot of stuff from remote. Copying files is one of those tasks you can do from anywhere on the world while being logged on via SSH. For this task it is good to know the speed of read/write to get an idea if it’s working s expected. When sitting in front of your computer, you can see if a HDD is working, in Windows you see a MB/s indication, and in Linux? Not all copy commands show you the transfer rate by standard. Some disk intensive tasks won’t at all (RAID sync).

To monitor disk activities in Linux, several tools are available. One is iostat.

Installation

To install iostat in Debian, you must install the package sysstat

apt-get install sysstat

Execute

To run iostat, just enter iostat in the shell.

iostat

The output will list the captured read / write speed of the available devices. To get a continuous output of the disk activites, run iostat -y 1. This will update the output every second until you end the program.

iostat -y 1

Several options are available to control the output. To get the disk read / write in Mb and not in kB, add the -m flag

iostat -y 1 -m

Using iostat you can see the throughput oft he disks, even when you are running “hidden” tasks like a RAID sync or copy process in another session (screen).

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Increase RAID sync rate

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Scenario

  • The HDDs are in an external USB case.
  • RAID5 with 3 HDD (10TB)
  • Software RAID5 with mdadm and Debian Linux

Adding a new disk

When you add a new HDD to an existing RAID, a sync is started. In my case I added a 10TB disk to a RAID5. The sync started and as estimated time I got something in the range of days. The estimated time is listed in finish=5384 min.

This number goes up and down a little bit, but overall result is that the sync will need days. After checking the status again after a while, it still showed days: finish=3437min.

The main problem here Is the rate at which mdadm can sync the data. The value is between 30000K and 43000K. That’s not much given the size of the RAID. There are several tips available on the internet. What help me was to set the stripe_cache_size.

STRIPE_CACHE_SIZE

You set the size of stripe_cache_size for each RAID device (mdX). In case your RAID is md0:

echo 32768 > /sys/block/md0/md/stripe_cache_size

Result

The speed increased to 100000K/sec. That’s close to 3x faster than before. Time went down drastically.

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Assign a static IP to DHCP client

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After setting up a DHCP server on a Raspberry Pi running Linux I get working leases for my clients. However, these are not static. It can happen that my smartphone gets a new IP address the next it connects: 192.168.0.161 instead of 192.168.0.160. For some clients I want to make sure they always use the same IP. This can achieved with ISC DHCP Server by registering a static lease for a specific MAC.

Example

I’ll use my soundbar for the rest of this blog as an example. The MAC of the network card is bc:30:d9:2a:c9:50. I want to always assign the IP 192.168.0.152 to the soundbar.

Find out client data

To find out the client data like MAC and current lease, check the DHCP server log. Or take a look at the back of the device or its settings to find out the MAC. For the DHCP server log on assigned leases:

sudo systemctl status isc-dhcp-server.service

The last line shows that the DHCP server assigned an IP to a client and shows also the MAC address.

DHCPACK on 192.168.0.152 to bc:30:d9:2a:c9:50

Let’s make sure the MAC bc:30:d9:2a:c9:50 always gets the IP 192.168.0.152.

Configuration

sudo vim /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf

This is the DHCP server configuration file. I already configured it for a subnet 192.168.0.x where the server is assigning leases for the IP addresses in the range of 192.168.0.150 to 192.168.0.240.

Inside the subnet configuration, I have to add a configuration for the soundbar for IP 192.168.0.152.

host soundbar {
  hardware ethernet bc:30:d9:2a:c9:50;
  fixed-address 192.168.0.152;
}

The complete dhcpd.conf file will look like this:

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  range 192.168.0.150 192.168.0.240;
  option routers 192.168.0.1;
  option domain-name "itsfullofstars.de";
  option domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4;
  host soundbar {
    hardware ethernet bc:30:d9:2a:c9:50;
    fixed-address 192.168.0.152;
  }
}

Activate configuration

To activate the new configuration, make either DHCPD load the new configuration from file, or restart the service.

sudo systemctl restart isc-dhcp-server.service

Check the status of the service.

sudo systemctl status isc-dhcp-server.service

Result

The assigned leases can be found in the dhcpd.leases file. All leases assigned are listed here, including the mac address, IP address, start and end time of the lease. If all works out as planned, the soundbar will be in there with the static IP.

sudo more /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd.leases

 

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DHCP Server on Linux with Raspberry Pi

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My internet provider is Unitymedia. Their default router comes with a DHCP server. Honestly, it’s one of the worst products I ever had to work with. My private network is 192.168.0.x. The DHCP server of the Unitymedia box is distributing from time to time leases for 192.168.192.x. Changing my private network to 192.168.192.x one is not working, as then the DHCP server picks another address range. Advise from Unitymedia help desk was to reboot the box, which, of course, won’t solve the problem. Because of this error, some of my devices are in a different network: Chromecast won’t work, broken internet connection on smartphones, etc.

I do have a Raspberry Pi (RP) in 24/7 use. My idea is to run my own DHCP server on the RP. This not only solves the DHCP problem, but also gives me more control over the DHCP configuration.

Preparation

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install isc-dhcp-server

This installs ISC DHCP server. As you can see in the output, starting the DHCP server failed.

sudo systemctl status isc-dhcp-server.service

The error is simply caused because the DHCP server is not configured. Let’s change that.

Configuration

Several parameters must be activated and configured.

sudo vim /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf

Lease time

default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;

Activate DHCP server

# If this DHCP server is the official DHCP server for the local
# network, the authoritative directive should be uncommented.
authoritative;

Subnet

This configures what IP address are going to be distributed. My private network is 192.168.0.x with the router on 192.168.0.1. As DNS you can use whatever you want, as an example I am using Google DNS servers.

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  range 192.168.0.150 192.168.0.240;
  option routers 192.168.0.1;
  option domain-name "itsfullofstars.de";
  option domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4;
}

This will give DHCP clients an IP address between .150 and .240, with router .1, Google DNS and sets the domain name to my own.

Deactivate old DHCP server

To not have the DHCP server provided by Unitymedia box still issuing wrong IP address, I am going to deactivate the service via the web interface.

Start DHCP server

After installing and configuring the new DHCP server on RP and deactivating the one from the router box, it’s time to start the new DHCP server.

Result

To see if a IP address is assigned, use this command:

sudo systemctl status isc-dhcp-server.service

Android

Putting my Android device into flight mode and back makes it connect to Wifi again and obtain a new IP address via DHCP. In the DHCP status log, I can see the DHCPDISCOVER from the Android device and that it got the IP address 192.168.0.150 assigned.

Mac

As my Mac always got the wrong IP assigned, I changed it to manual configuration. Change the mode to DHCP, apply and deactivate / activating Wifi.

Soundbar

And my soundbar that got a strange IP address assigned by the Unitymedia router box? Works too!

Chromcast streaming shows the SoundBar is now in the same network.

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Apt-get unable to connect to IPv6 address

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Recently I had the problem that running apt-get update stalled while trying to connect to an IPv6 address. For instance, on a Raspberry Pi, the update process stalls while trying to connect to archive.raspberrypi.org. All other connections worked fine. Looking at the console output, a difference was that apt was trying to connect to an IPv6 address.

The problem was caused by:

100% [Connecting to archive.raspberrypi.org (2a00:1098:0:80:1000:13:0:8)]

A quick internet search showed that you can force apt to not use IPv6 and only IPv4. As the download worked for IPv4, this seems like a reasonable workaround.

Solution

You can pass a parameter to disable IPv4 to apt-get, or write it to apt config file to make it persistent.

Configuration file

Create a new configuration file. This makes it easy for you to keep the change during updates and to know that you configured this.

sudo vim /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99disable-ipv6
Insert Acquire::ForceIPv4 "true";
Save
apt-get update

Parameter

To disable IPv6 just once while calling apt, the parameter is Acquire::ForceIPv4=true.

sudo apt-get -o Acquire::ForceIPv4=true update

Result

Loading the package data from archive raspberrypi.org is now ignored and apt-get update works again.

 

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Partitioning and formatting a large disk

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I got a new 10 TB disk. Before I’ll add this one to a RAID, I want to play around with it, aka: test the drive. Therefore, I’ll need to format the drive to mount it. And before that, I need to create a partition.

FDISK

In the good old days, you used fdisk to partition a HDD. Since a few years, fdisk was replaced by parted as fdisk got some issues with large. Nevertheless, it still works.

Make sure to create a GPT partition table (g), and not the old new partition (n) alternative. Creating a new partition using “n” gives you a 2 TB partition.

Creating a new disklabel of type GPT using “g” gives you 10TB. The create the GPT disklabel and the new partition, use: g & n.

PARTED

An alternative to fdisk is parted. Parted is newer than fdisk and there are GUIs available to make it easier to end users to use it. Parted allows to pass parameters to it and do all the partition and sizing stuff in one command.

parted -s -a optimal /dev/sde mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%

Create Filesystem

Finally, after the HDD is partitioned, it’s time to format the partition with EXT4. Of course you can use a different filesystem.

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sde1

mount /dev/sde1 /mnt/sde/

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