Alas! My setup described in a previous post faced some issues. Mainly a crash that happened quite frequently, a few times a week: [drm] Resetting GPU..

That was leaving me no better option than to reboot to fix it. It is discussed on the Kodi forum and further reading suggested if was fixed on more recent kernels.

Because OSMC is running an older version of Debian, an upgrade was problematic. Instead I installed a fresh Raspberry Pi OS, coming with Debian Trixie. And then, installed Kodi from the official Debian packages instead of using OSMC.

All the better, I’ll be able keep it up to date more frequently, and H.264 decoding worked well out of the box. This blog post helped me to run Kodi as a service.

I went down the rabbit hole once again, setting up most of the things manually, recovering my previous configuration. This is one of these time when having a USB keyboard around is quite useful, to navigate the Kodi’s menus faster (I know, I know, I could configure most of it via files, but it is also interesting to go through all the different options manually). I also ended up re-using the OSMC Kodi theme, as it felt lightweight and more pleasant than the alternatives.

The original drm/GPU issue is gone. I’m just left with a tiny annoying random one where the TV sometimes turns on on its own, out of the blue. For that I enabled CEC debug logs and I’m waiting for the next time it happens to understand why.

Sometimes, video playback over SMB/Wifi buffers a bit, I’m not entirely sure where it is going from. That’s a story for another time!