Mecool M8S Pro L, Kodi with external HDD doesn't work smoothly

[josch76]

Dear all,

After trying to run Kodi (both TV Center & Libreelec via SD Card), I switched back to my Raspberry PI 3 which performs better than this box!
What is the best way (related to the performance) to run Kodi on the M8S Pro L? I don't need Android or something.
I want to run Kodi with 4K support.

My hardware:
M8S Pro L
Standard Firmware (incl. TV Center)
External (powered!) 4 TB harddrive

If I play a movie in 1080P, the movie stutters. But very very fast. But you see that something's going wrong.
If I play a 4K movie, it seems to be ok.

On my Raspberry with the same HD, everything runs perfect!

What can I do to bring the Mecool back in the game?

Regards from Germany
Jan

[Geekstuff4fun]

Have you tried the latest firmware? Or OTA update?

Sent from my LGLS992 using Tapatalk

[FreshYuk]

Before my Wifi died I had no problem at all running 1080p movies with CoreElec, including a couple of 10bit x265 mkv's that my NUC just didn't like... I can't answer for 4k, since I don't have either a 4k TV or 4k files to test.
In case you're wondering, CoreElec = LibreElec optimized for Android boxes & running Kodi 18 (beta, atm).

[josch76]

Coreelec works perfect!!! Thank you

[asdfaskdfjaskdflkdsf]

I'm not sure how much this might help someone else in my situation, but I bought one of these android tv mecool m8s pro l boxes to play content from my 8tb seagate external hard drive. I had the issue where when hooking up the drive it would immediately say safely ejected. I had it set to exfat format at the time, as I was using it for my ps4 also. There was an app by paragon software that eventually let me mount it to the android tv file system as ntfs, after I paid a bit of money to do so. but it wasn't reliable at all, and it was some sort of hook program that kodi couldn't see anyways. So after moving about 6 tb worth of files back and forth and reformatting to ntfs I finally got it recognized by the box, but it worked one time.

after that it was difficult to get the android tv version shipped with this to see it at all ,kept ejecting it. So I tried libreelec, openeelec, worked just fine to mount the hard drive, but broke remote functionality and spent some time getting that going, however. My purpose was also to use a usb based bluetooth headset, but openeelec and libreelec and coreelec I tried many, all failed to utilize my crappy usb bluetooth afterglow ag9+ headseat for ps4. It worked fine in the original android tv, but my problem was I couldn't mount the 8tb external drive at this point. Yes I know, best to just get a better headphone set, but no. I didn't want to just yet. I'll do that later. So I needed my usb bluetooth cheap-o headset to work and also need my external hdd to be mounted to be seen by kodi on android. The rom that came with this box doesn't work for external hdds at all.

This is the rom I flashed to my box that everything is working on as it states, the wifi chip info is important to flash otherwise it breaks functionality, it behaves like a phone somewhat, but the remote works, usb ps4 headphones work, and best of all, it asks what you want to do with your external hdd upon connecting instead of ejecting immediately like the shipped firmware.

https://forum.freaktab.com/forum/tv-...om-android-7-1

If you cant get your hard drive to mount with mecool m8s pro L version, I'd say look at the nexus rom, it's worth it to me to deal with the shit interface functionality to have my external hard drive working, and remote working outside of having to try to find the correct config files for libreelec or coreelec. Which didn't work very well with my shit headset anyways. I'm sure a lot of people here may already know this information, but I'm just posting here so that upon google searching it might pop up for someone, wish it did for me before spending a crap ton of time trying to figure this out.

Also in case anyone is wondering the headset did work with libreelec, but only the left ear or one side worked. Not sure why libreelec on rasp pi 3 worked just fine with this headphones. I tried a lot of different configurations to get it to work but couldn't sort the sound problem. Best solution was trying this other rom. Seems great so far. Hope this helps someone else.