Can I replace my NVIDIA card with Something Else here?

1st Official Post

    HI. New to LibreElec as of this AM. Discovered last night OpenELEC was dead. So here I am. :)

    Was reading the Development update and found out my NVIDIA card is about to become obsolete: It will be useless in LE 10, and it sounds like it may have problems even in LE9.

    Am I reading all of that correctly? If so, can I just swap out my GT610 with something else and be good to go?

    I've got:

    4G DDR3 PC3 10666

    Celeron dual-core 2.5G CPU

    AsRock H77M mainboard

    Note that I currently don't have any 4k content or display abilities.

    Thanks,

    John

    You could certainly fit an Radeon RX 550 or a similar GCN based card which will be a bit more futureproof in regards to VAAPI, but I'd recommend just running it with your Intel IGP (if that old Celery has one), or slightly more drastic, swap the whole motherboard out for an integrated Apollo/Gemini Lake mITX, which will be silent and just as futureproof in regards to >LE9.

    Klojum, LOL....no...I've been running this system since 2012. RMA unlikely. :)

    powerarmour:

    Well, the MB has 7.1 channel HD audio which is good.

    Video info:

    From the MB manual:

    Supports Intel HD Graphics Built-in Visuals: Intel® Quick Sync Video, Intel InTruTM 3D, Intel Clear Video HD Technology, Intel InsiderTM, Intel HD Graphics 2500/4000, Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)

    And going to http://01.org/linuxgraphics, I find supported hardware for VAAPI:

    Intel HD Graphics 2000/3000 (in 2nd Generation Intel Core i7/i5/i3 Processor family)

    Intel HD Graphics 2500/4000 (in 3nd Generation Intel Core i7/i5/i3 Processor family)

    The Intel page says this for my Celeron:

    Intel HD Graphics for 2nd Generation Intel Processors

    And it looks like a Celeron is not an i3/i5/i7, even tho it is a Sandy Bridge CPU.

    Looks like I can get a core i3-2130 for around $80 tho.

    A Redeon looks to be $100. And it has a fan. I like the fanless NVIDIA GPU.

    So would my best bet here be to just get a new CPU once LE9 comes out?

    Thanks,

    John

    • Official Post

    AMD supports GBM (Generic Buffer Management) which facilitates the future V4L2 pipeline same as every other GPU/SoC vendor. nVidia has decided to follow their own "standard" that nobody else uses. Team Kodi are done with supporting proprietary standards due to all the extra code spaghetti and support work it entails so AMD (and basically all other current vendors except nVidia) are fine and support for nVidia in Kodi will almost certainly die off. We see it as nVidia's responsibility to start following standards, not our responsibility to rewrite everything around nVidia.

    Quote from jabster

    So would my best bet here be to just get a new CPU once LE9 comes out?

    I'd either just use your existing Celeron, or you could even go for an RPi3 if you don't have 4K display or content. For 1080p you really don't need the extra overkill most of the time, it depends on what you're happy with.

    powerarmour:

    I don't think the existing Celeron supports the Intel HD graphics. If I'm going to upgrade tho I may as well get something that supports 4K. I'm bound to have it at some point.

    klojum:

    I don't care about having the Latest And Greatest as long as what I get will work, especially when I can save a couple hundred bucks on the difference (Apollo Lake vs Coffee Lake).

    I do miss the Good Old Days tho when one could just pick out the fastest processor and know you had the best one. Sigh.

    Thanks.

    • Official Post

    Nope, because decoding and rendering are separate things. Even if FFmpeg supports NVDEC for decoding we still need to render the decoded video via a zero-copy code-path and this is where the issue lies. Kodi supports GBM and nVidia's driver supports a competing "standard" (used only by nVidia) called EGL Streams. So Kodi will need to add another vendor-specific code path just for nVidia. The two logical candidates to do that within Team Kodi are lrusak (who wrote the GBM code) and the main architect fertnetmenta (who maintains VideoPlayer) and so far neither of them are interested.

    Well, I'll maybe take a look at it. But to be honest I'm getting smooth 4K playback just fine in Kodi 17 with a four year old silent HTPC. If it degrades in future maybe I'll have an incentive to get involved.