CoreElec DVD problem

This is mostly done for posterity sake. I had to make DVD playing possible on CoreElec, that I just had reinstalled completely.

What have I done?

So I am running CoreElec on a simple Odroid N2+ device. Something went wrong, since Kodi would suddenly not boot anymore and show picture. Still unsure of what happened, but I decided to reflash the latest CoreElec and start over. Nothing of import was on the device, all my data is on another disk attached to a Odroid HC4 that acts as a NFS server.

After I reflashed the device, it all came up and my daughter asked me to watch a DVD. I inserted the disk and nothing happened.

Memories of the past

I immediately was pulled back to the previous time DVD did not work on Kodi. I needed libdvdcss. So I searched for it on the device and I could not find it. I did find in a subdirectory buried deep in Kodi that it had libdvdnav_arm.so. When I asked AI, I got conflicting answers, and some if not most are conflicting CoreElec with LibreElec. So I was still the only one who could fix it.

Then I found out that sadly CoreElec uses a squashfs root filesystem. This means it is read only and you cannot remount it with rw permissions. So I was stuck a bit. Then I thought, well I can remount the /flash partition and grab the squashfs and md5 checksum and just unpack it, add the necessary lib files and then squash it back, redo the checksum and put it back on the device. Worst case scenario, just do a reflash and add two sources back in Kodi.

Repacking

I did exactly that. I remounted the partition, copied the squashfs and checksum locally, unpacked it. Then I placed the necessary files, including a little more than just libdvdcss.so but also a couple other files. Then I repacked it (keeping in mind to use the same compression lzo) and copied it back to the device. Then I rebooted and I waited tensely.

Conclusion

My daughter has watched quite a few DVDs already, and all are successful. My son has watched the complete Tom and Jerry collection we have, and my daughter has watched Cloudy with a chance for meatballs 2.