Is it possible to get Kodi 17.6 on a Raspberry Pi 4?

1st Official Post

    I like the Pi4, but hate some of the features in Kodi 18; Specifically, I make frequent use of the video brightness and contrast settings for a specific film to tweak the video to my liking. Now that have removed that from the video settings for some reason. Is it possible to get Kodi 17.6 on a Pi4? I see in the LE builds for the Pi4 that only LE 9 is available, and that comes with Kodi 18. Is it possible to roll the Kodi back by installing an update that goes backwards, not forwards? 8)

    Thank you, chewitt,

    I already found the confluence skin and installed it. But that does not solve my problem of video settings removed from Kodi 18.

    I don't need to roll back Libreelec to 8, so that might bypass hardware issues, don't you think? LE9 will still work on that hardware, but will it support Kodi 17.6? I cannot think why not since Kodi is so generic it runs on a vast plethora of hardware and OS's. Is there any real reason that LE9 won't support Kodi 17.6?

    My main question is how would I install Kodi 17.6 on a Pi4 over Kodi 18.4? Where would I put an install file, and configured for what? Can one update Kodi 17.3 to 17.6 without updating the underlying LibreElec 8.1? If so, how would that be done? :/ :?:

    • Official Post

    RPi4 requires GBM/MMAL code paths in Kodi, and while MMAL exists in the Kodi v17 codebase the GBM bits do not, so it is not (and is unlikely to ever be) possible to run Kodi v17 on an RPi4 board. There is sub-zero official (LE, Kodi or Pi Foundation) interest in exploring that direction. It's not impossible to backport .. but that depends on your personal coding and distro packaging skils?

    NB: In LE the base OS, dependencies and Kodi are tightly coupled. You cannot update Kodi without updating the base OS at the same time, and you cannot just swap Kodi versions in/out as you like.

    Thank you, chewitt, once again. You have allowed me to understand why I cannot install Kodi 17 on LE 9.

    I have not explored other OS's for the Pi4 like CoreElec or even Raspian, since I've always gone to OpenElec or LibreElec to meet my Kodi needs. I wonder if there is any other route to Kodi v17.6 for a RPi4?

    • Official Post

    Even *if* it was possible to compile RPI4 for Kodi 17 I doubt anyone would bother to "downgrade" their release.

    CoreELEC is Amlogic only so no use.

    OpenELEC is *dead* AFAIK

    Raspbian *might* work but I doubt it - the only way to find out is to try.

    GeeXboX seems to be dead also.

    I guess your *best* solution is to use an older RPi3.

    Thank you, Iridium, I realized I was grasping at straws. The RPi4 is such an elegant box with so much in so little space that I'd love to make do what I want. I fear that eventually I will need to make my peace with Kodi v18 but it seems to have removed more that I liked than it added to Kodi. I still use Confluence so you can see where I'm at.

    I have a RPi1+ and RPi3b and a RPi4b. Only the latter will play 4K so it would depend on which TV I would be using it on. In 90% of my uses (hotel rooms, a friends house, etc) the RPi3b is very adequate. Even the old RPi1+ works for playing off a USB drive very nicely at 1080p.

    Thanks again for your advice. You guys here are the best :):!: