How much RAM for Kodi on RPI 4?

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How much RAM for Kodi on RPI 4?

Postby snack » Sun Sep 12, 2021 5:18 pm

I am thinking about buying a Raspberry Pi 4 to run Kodi (mainly IPTV but also for streaming h265 media from local network storage) under Arch ARM. I am unsure about how much RAM could be needed for that, and since the amount of RAM significantly affects the price I'd like to have some suggestion about this to avoid breaking my wallet for an unnecessary amount of RAM.
I am a total newbie about Arch ARM (although I run Arch on all my x86_64 machines), Kodi, and RPI 4, so if there is any issue in the configuration I'm about to set up (e.g. performance with h265) the please warn me!
Thanks in advance for any support.
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Re: How much RAM for Kodi on RPI 4?

Postby graysky » Sun Sep 12, 2021 5:52 pm

The 2 GB model is plenty for even 4k x265 decoding. You're only allocating up to 512 M as it is.
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Re: How much RAM for Kodi on RPI 4?

Postby snack » Mon Sep 13, 2021 6:54 am

Thank you, graysky!
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Re: How much RAM for Kodi on RPI 4?

Postby SpaceOne » Tue Sep 14, 2021 8:12 am

I don’t have any problems playing x265 videos on rpi4 2gb with rpi kernel. But the best kodi experience out of the box on the rpi4 you will definitely get with libreelec.
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Re: How much RAM for Kodi on RPI 4?

Postby graysky » Tue Sep 14, 2021 8:37 am

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SpaceOne', 'I') don’t have any problems playing x265 videos on rpi4 2gb with rpi kernel. But the best kodi experience out of the box on the rpi4 you will definitely get with libreelec.


For the record, the Arch ARM kodi packages use nearly identical kodi branch and settings (full hw decoding support). Our stuff follows the Arch Way for setup. Maybe your opinion about experiencing the "best kodi experience" is based on having other services on the LE box configured for you.
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Re: How much RAM for Kodi on RPI 4?

Postby SpaceOne » Tue Sep 14, 2021 1:45 pm

Well, I also mentioned "out of the box".
Using default rpi4 installation downloaded from https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv ... berry-pi-4, I wasn't able even to boot it (solution was then found in viewtopic.php?f=67&t=15422). And after solving the uboot/mmc problem, I noticed the default mainline aarch64 kernel doesn't support hardware acceleration, so the only way to play x265 with kodi is to install raspberry pi kernel.

With libreelec is enough to simply flash the sd card and you have everything working.

Of course, you cannot compare both distributions directly, but from kodi perspective, libreelec was painless experience.
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Re: How much RAM for Kodi on RPI 4?

Postby snack » Wed Sep 15, 2021 7:54 am

Thanks to everybody for the suggestions. I have another question related to the RAM amount: how much will the 2GB model swap? Nowadays that's quite a small amount of RAM (at least on desktops) so I fear that the RPI will swap a lot and thus put a lot of stress on the SD card. In this case I think a high-endurance SD model will be mandatory; do you have any suggestion about which SD model could be good from this point of view?
Thanks again.
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