* failed to open vchiq instance

General
1

I’m running Mopidy with Iris and Musicbox webclient, it appears to load correctly, but as soon as I try and play anything in Iris* I get a red box flash up “Mopidy Websocket Closed” and when looking at the status (sudo systemctl status mopidy) these are the last 4 lines.

Mar 27 21:48:01 raspberrypi mopidy[335]: * failed to open vchiq instance
Mar 27 21:48:01 raspberrypi systemd[1]: mopidy.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=255/n/a
Mar 27 21:48:01 raspberrypi systemd[1]: mopidy.service: Unit entered failed state.
Mar 27 21:48:01 raspberrypi systemd[1]: mopidy.service: Failed with result ‘exit-code’.

I searched but can’t find any info anywhere.
*Musicbox webclient also stops at the same point - but I don’t get the error message flagged up.

A restart loads everything again, but still won’t play.

2

I remember something about needing the mopidy user to be a member of both the audio and video groups in the latest versions of Raspbian. Is mopidy in the video group? I don’t think we do that in our debian package.

3

I don’t know about video group, it’s just a standard setup, latest stretch with desktop, mopidy and snapclient. How would I check?

I think the answer is in this post Mopidy as service crashes and is missing iris extension which I couldn’t find before, however I don’t know how to set the permissions.

4

I got it to stop crashing by using
sudo adduser mopidy audio
sudo adduser mopidy video
not sure if that was correct, however now it plays but I still can’t get any sound out of it.

5

As you probably discovered you can see the groups a user is in by running groups <username>.

As to why there is no sound, first stop is a simple config (i.e. NO FIFO) and:
https://docs.mopidy.com/en/latest/installation/raspberrypi/#testing-sound-output
then try a gst-launch example from:
https://docs.mopidy.com/en/latest/audio/
then ensure your soundcard is as expected with aplay -l etc

6

I hadn’t, so thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
To solve the original issue I did
‘groups mopidy’ without the ‘’ this showed mopidy was only in the audio group.
So I did
‘sudo adduser mopidy video’ rebooted
and this resolved the crashing problem.

Sound issues could have been anything, aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav worked fine, but nothing would play when trying
gst-launch-1.0 audiotestsrc ! audioresample ! autoaudiosink

I had already set sound for headphone only.

I’ve finally got it working, it may have been because I had an hdmi lead attached to a monitor, (perhaps there wouldn’t be the same problem in the lite version) or a duff wifi adapter, I’ve now unplugged the hdmi lead and wifi adapter and am using a powerline adapter and its working.

Thanks again for your help.

7

Hi! I had the same issue on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspbian and was able to solve it, too. Could somebody please update the apt package so that the group is set automagically? Otherwise it’s really tricky to track down for beginners!