Install LibreELEC Himedia Q5 PRO

1st Official Post
    • Official Post

    HiSilicon SoC's are not currently supported. Work being done in Kodi at the moment could make support technically possible in the future, but there are no current plans for us to do anything (our hands are full with Amlogic, Rockchip and Allwinner) so progress really depends on someone in the community ecosystem around us raising their hand to do the porting work.

    chewitt

    Can you give more details on what exactly is being done in Kodi now to help with Hisilicon port? Also do you think all necessary software bits and pieces are available for the LE to run reliably on HI3798C V200?

    Quote from CvH

    afaik there is no proper linux support available that works with the gpus, also there is likely not too much interest from the devs to support this very very expensive hardware as an 20€+ device does the same today

    Do you mean the SDK for hw accelerated video playback for linux is missing or you mean fb support/drivers for GUI? I have seen some abandoned OE port for older V100 chips, not sure if the SDK is the same or it is different and what is the source of it. I could not find any free SDK for android/linux available.

    You are right that cheap devices can do the same today and it's hard to say what might make hisilicon devices better (video quality? - subjective, inconclusive; formats support? - Dolby Vision? not sure if it actually works on hisilicon boards). Yet the chipset user base should be reasonably large now. Himedia, Egreat, Poplar, Zappiti and more. I have seen some interest to LE on futeko forums as well.

    I am not experienced in linux porting at all, but looking at the Kodi patches for V100 OE port I think I could have helped with DVDPlayer porting , of course if I had the SDK and docs.

    Please, correct me if I am wrong: it is possible to adopt Kodi to use the hisilicon proprietary interfaces for video/audio playback first (I think that some companies like Zidoo prefer this approach) and then package this Kodi up (maybe with some adjustments) into LE JeOS

    firmware. Not sure if a Kodi for Android fork would do for this purpose.

    • Official Post
    Quote from laowai

    it is possible to adopt Kodi to use the hisilicon proprietary interfaces for video/audio playback first

    not even Himedia has done this, instead they use/used an wrapper with some bogus decoding engine, K18 etc have no support and will never get support for this kind of "crap" - if they don't use the standard api (they don't) then nothing works

    There are basically no drivers out there that are enough for linux, there is a linux sdk but without gpu driver.

    Not sure how this could work (if it work at all) - MAYBE libhybris (uses Android driver at linux)? But this is nothing an LE dev is working or is willing to work on. But as usual if someone wants to PR it we won't stop them (yea I know nothing that helps you).

    Quote from laowai

    what might make hisilicon devices better

    nothing, really - they use the same chips as the 20-30€ boxes, if you want a good and very well supported Android Player use a Nvidia Shield :)

    Hmmm, sounds pretty gloomy...

    It is funny, when I was buying my Q5 Pro I looked at the official Kodi hardware support page and saw this:

    So I thought that Kodi is very well supported on hisilicon chipset. Of course the hw decoding is only one side of the story, although a very important one. It looks very misleading now. Kodi on Q5 Pro is not working well at all. The media center app plays videos a lot better (probably using proprietary interfaces). The chances of LE port are close to 0.

    Something tells me my box will end up on ebay soon.

    • Official Post

    not sure from where you got the informations ^^^ (link?)

    support is not equal support ;)

    That the Himedia has some fundamentally problems is sadly nothing new :/ especially if you consider that they are high priced devices and no china garage manufacture stuff or 20€. If you need those kind of Android Player an Shield is always a better choice also price wise they are very similar.

    • Official Post

    hmpf that is ofc very suspicious because nobody told you at the page if it works native or due an extremely ugly hack :(

    kodi works at HiMedia Q10 Pro - but well just with that hack aka "wrapper", so this page is rather misleading at this point