Can I replace my NVIDIA card with Something Else here?

jabster · October 18, 2018 at 6:55 PM

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

powerarmour · October 19, 2018 at 2:03 AM

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.

theboy181 · October 19, 2018 at 5:01 AM

Dam! I just bought a fan-less 1050 for kodi.

**Klojum** · October 19, 2018 at 8:12 AM Official Post

RMA it if you still can.

jabster · October 19, 2018 at 2:45 PM

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

jabster · October 19, 2018 at 2:46 PM

Tho I did find this as well:

vga sets-_-n82e16813157731&gclid=cjwkcajwgabebrbueiwacd4r5npbeggh33k9dm0ajskmdoe-qzu7gdbf4eqlllbudgtrts9hm-07ghocwt0qavd_bwe&gclsrc=aw.ds

ASRock J4205-ITX Intel Quad-Core Pentium Processor J4205 (up to 2.6GHz) Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo

$100 plus some RAM.

-john

**Klojum** · October 19, 2018 at 2:49 PM Official Post

Quote from jabster

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

Sorry, my remark was towards @theboy181

Should've tagged him, but as I'm currently pretty snotty from the flu and possibly other stuff, I simply forgot.

theboy181 · October 19, 2018 at 4:16 PM

I'm running a i74790 with 16GB of RAM, and the 1050 - I wonder if they will fully remove VDPAU and it will NERF my HTPC?

**chewitt** · October 19, 2018 at 4:28 PM Official Post

It will be removed once Team Kodi fork the v18 release branch and the master branch becomes v19. If you're lucky someone will come along and implement EGL streams + NVDEC support in Kodi. It's do-able, but it's unlikely to be someone from Team Kodi.

**Klojum** · October 19, 2018 at 6:16 PM Official Post

Quote from jabster

ASRock J4205-ITX Intel Quad-Core Pentium Processor J4205

FYI, that is not the latest Intel generation. If you don't mind the ITX format, I'd now go for a Pentium Gold G5400, it has a bit more grunt than the Celeron variants.

theboy181 · October 20, 2018 at 3:37 AM

Shouldn't Kodi team be gender neutral? I cant see why ATI is getting all the attention. ROOTS!

**chewitt** · October 20, 2018 at 4:03 AM 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.

theboy181 · October 20, 2018 at 8:10 AM

I do hope that this has been communicated to them then. I would hate to see some of there better products getting ignored in the future.

powerarmour · October 20, 2018 at 12:51 PM

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.

jabster · October 20, 2018 at 11:11 PM

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.

planetmarshall · November 9, 2018 at 2:25 PM

Quote from chewitt

If you're lucky someone will come along and implement EGL streams + NVDEC support in Kodi. It's do-able, but it's unlikely to be someone from Team Kodi.

Doesn't NVDEC support come for free by using ffmpeg?

**chewitt** · November 9, 2018 at 5:30 PM 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.

planetmarshall · November 11, 2018 at 7:05 PM

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.