[WIP, updated April 11th] A5X Max RK3328 TV Box support

    Hi,

    I wanted to say "thank you" for your image. I have a MX10 RK3328 box that has very similar specs to the A5X max. I tried your image along with the A5X dtb and the system boots up and playback is great.

    I did try 150balbes RK3328 and my own (based on LibreELEC-master). In those cases I used 150balbes dtb for the MX10, but your dtb (so far) is the only one that correctly changes the led to blue when the box is running (the others set the led to red).

    Inbuilt Wifi is not working (I have a USB Wifi adapter that does work). I'm guessing that I may need to extract and modify my MX10 dtb from Android but I don't know how easy this would be. Do you know of any guide/tutorial for doing this?

    Also, do you know how I can find wifi chip (without opening the box)?

    Many thanks for your time and effort.

    ukmark62 I'm myself not very familiar with this process. I started working based on a DTS file available in Armbian forum. To compare values with Android, I connected to the device running Android with adb and copied the info on /sys folder . If there is any other dtb with working wifi , even if it is a disaster in every other aspect, I suggest to extract the DTS or ask balbes150 for the DTS file and try to copy the wifi section from one to the other.


    Updated first post with new information about whitelist.

    Quote from madmalkav

    ukmark62 I'm myself not very familiar with this process. I started working based on a DTS file available in Armbian forum. To compare values with Android, I connected to the device running Android with adb and copied the info on /sys folder . If there is any other dtb with working wifi , even if it is a disaster in every other aspect, I suggest to extract the DTS or ask balbes150 for the DTS file and try to copy the wifi section from one to the other.


    Updated first post with new information about whitelist.

    Thanks for that.

    One more thing - have you compiled your own fork of LibreELEC? The reason I ask is that I would like to create a fork of your build (or the original build if you have not made any changes), in order to apply a Kodi patch of mine to fix audio being occasionally muted for a few seconds on playback resume. Also the GUI on your build is much more responsive than the one on mine (it could be that I did not compile from LibreELEC-master correctly).

    Cheers.

    By the way, the whitelist for 720p is normal to only have 50p, 59.94p and 60p. Most TVs only have the extra refresh rates at the higher resolutions (don't know why that is - but all TVs I've had have been that way.)

    Edited once, last by ukmark62 (April 11, 2019 at 10:17 PM).

    I did clone Libreelec to my computer, I didn't fork it. I plan to fork , apply my patches, upload to github and do a PR to LibreElec as soon as I have ironed out some stuff. My goal is still to mainline this if possible. I will share the links here as soon as possible.


    Updated first post with info on how to use MCE type remote with the embedded IR receiver. Getting closer...

    Edited once, last by madmalkav (April 11, 2019 at 10:41 PM).

    I didn't realise that dtb files had such an impact on things. I was aware of their effect on wifi, usb ports and booting up, but I did not know they could affect gui speed so much. I used your a5x dtb instead of the mx10.dtb used by my build (latest stock LibreELEC master build compiled by myself) and the GUI speed has improved dramatically - and the only change was swapping the dtb and editing extlinux.conf to reference it.

    The mx10.dtb was provided in the 150balbes build.

    I believe my wifi chip is RTL8723BS.

    Update: I managed to locate the mx10 dtb from Android Oreo - the file was named "fdt". I copied it and decompiled it in Linux to a dts file and looked at the source code. My wifi chip is RTL8723BS - guess we need driver source for that to get onboard wifi working. I tried this new dtb file with my image and it works very well (albeit no wifi).

    Edited once, last by ukmark62 (April 12, 2019 at 6:31 PM).

    A lot of devices including mine use that wifi chip without problems. But the DTS need to have the correct info on how the chip is connected on the device to work. And you can't just copy Android DTS info to the Linux DTS info, because they are mapped differently. I'm probably not explaining it very well but if you take a look to some DTS that are not decompiled but properly written i.e. in the kernel code you will probably see what I mean.

    I had no time in the last week, but now I was able to look at some things.

    I could not make screenshoots (no USB keyboard in the house), so resorted to low q photos with my phone.

    Here are the supported resolutions on my TV with your image and DTB (Samsung 43NU7122):

    Pic1

    Pic2

    Pic3

    Pic4

    Pic5

    Also, I have a problem, with LibreELEC on this device, since I got it: on my UHD TV, when I watch 1080p videos, everything is a bit zoomed in, like this. But when I watch 2160p videos, everything is normal. If durring playback, I change the resolution to 2160, in the menu, it fixes the video, and the UI, but the subtitles dissapear, until I change the resolution back to 1080. But then, the video and the UI get zoomed in again.

    Here is the log: http://ix.io/1gna

    Sorry for not replying sooner, life's being a bitch lately and I barely have any free time. I was thinking that probably we can use the generic nightly build with the DTS file and a keymap file instead of compiling the keymap with the kernel, so that way we can test nightlies with minimal effort. To be honest, I'm not sure how to fix stuff like what theAlevan reported, and probably it is not specific to our device anyway.

    Non-update update: I haven-t had any time to work on this. Current DTS works OK if you don't try to use WiFi or BT and if you have good cooling. I will perhaps come back to try to make it work with the new images based on kernel mainline in a month or two. No promises. Anyone can continue from where I left with the files linked, if someone wants to try to do a quick file to get remote support without compiling I can try to help with that.