simple question with complicated answers? :)

1st Official Post

    Hello,

    let me at first place thank you for all your work on LibreELEC which Iam using for several years on various rpi's around the house. They always works and do what I need.

    Really appreciated!

    now to my simple yet complicated question.

    I've run into some issues with all this new European DVBT2 madness and 265/HEVC which is used in our country to encode TV streams.

    I must say in LibreELEC even RPI3 is able to properly display HEVC streams, this is not the issue.

    What kind of bugs me is why "normal" Kodi on RPI3 eg. non-LibreELEC builds aka Raspbian are not able to work with 265/HEVC at all?

    It's not really about raspbian i guess, but it's about Kodi itself which for some reason works much worse than LibreELEC version .

    Basically what I need is kind of non-restricted linux beneath trully superb optimized LibreELEC Kodi. Is that even possible? Or otherway round, is there a way how to compile "same" Kodi as is used in LibreELEC (specifically HEVC HW decoding) and use that build on RPI3 running raspbian?

    As I do understand why is not possible to have libreelec on full inux system, would be super nice to know how to build Kodi from sources with ffmpeg hevc support so RPI3 will be able to run raspbian with kodi which works... ;)

    I know, simple yet complicated.

    K.

    • Official Post

    LE images for RPi use a tweaked version of ffmpeg and Kodi that contains work done by the Raspberry Pi foundation to optimise HEVC performance on Pi hardware. I'm a little suprised that Raspbian doesn't include the same given who created (and maintains) those sources.

    LibreELEC.tv/package.mk at master · LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv · GitHub <= should have everything needed.

    OSMC uses the same upstream (AFAIK) so might be worth investigating too - as it's Debian based under the hood.

    FWIW I also ran raspbian with kodi and it was OK but never as good as libre. I thought I needed to operate that way given lack of apt get on libreelec. That was until someone in here pointed me towards the Docker addon.

    Now I run all and sundry services in docked containers on my libreelec board whilst getting the tuned kodi experience.

    Perhaps not suitable for your use case but something to consider. LinuxServer.io have a fairly comprehensive list of Docker images that are well maintained.