LibreELEC 9.2 on Amlogic?

1st Official Post

    I have an ODROID-C2. LibreELEC 9.2 came out over 6 months ago, an there's still no Amlogic support. Should I just buy new hardware at this point, or is it expected to be released soon?

    It's debatable - what do you really need in 9.2 that you can't get in the current 9.0 builds?

    Odroid_C2 – LibreELEC

    Your Odroid contains a Mali 450 GPU - and we see that as that GPU is being used for the Pine phone/tab PINEPHONE | PINE64, so as the open-sourced Lima version of the driver is still getting updates, it's still improving. However there will never be hardware decoding of VP9/H265.

    As Chewitt says here, Meson 8* Lives!, there is work being done on Meson 8 which is what your Odroid uses (Amlogic s905). You can see in the link Chewitt provides in the last post, as recently as June 30, a test build was done by xdarklight Branches · xdarklight/linux · GitHub. So, nothing for the near future, but there might be community builds.....

    As for getting a new device, do you really want to get a device now with a GPU that will be unable to decode AV1 video files that will be everywhere in a year or two. Personally I'm waiting for something like the Mecool Pro III with satellite/cable DVB tuners and AV1 hardware decoding (and obviously VP9/H265).

    • Official Post

    Odroid C2 is a Meson 9 (GXBB) device (not Meson8) which is fully supported in mainline Linux for ages. It doesn't have VP9 like newer devices (and HEVC is still work in progress) but it's still quite a nice board. You can find current test images here: Index of / .. search on "odroid" and you'll find a "board" image that includes mainline u-boot. Hardware decoding is still a challenge (no seeking) but.. see what works for you.

    Also having an Odroid C2 I wonder what are the experiences with these test builts? I somewhere read that there will be a stable LibreELEC 10 for Odroid's C2. Is there a kind of roadmap for when to expect stable releases?

    Appreciate your work!

    • Official Post

    Images are super fast to boot and the OS is much more efficient than the legacy kernel. The one issue is the hardware decoder (no HEVC) and seeking in video (doesn't work). If that situation improves I will release stable LE10 images. If it doesn't, I won't - because it's too core to the user experience and Amlogic users are a particularly whiny group. Newer hardware can get away with disabling hardware decode and still play everything under 4K but older S905/S905X devices need the hardware decoder to work.

    I'm not whining ;)... Of course seeking in video and hardware decoding is essential, so I'll keep my fingers crossed. Some LibreELEC version with a KODI version (>=19) supporting Python3 addons would be much appreciated for the long run.

    Thank's for the info.

    Quote from callagg2

    It's debatable - what do you really need in 9.2 that you can't get in the current 9.0 builds?

    Odroid_C2 – LibreELEC

    There's lots of little annoyances; most recently I needed to find a way to upgrade InputStream Adaptive to a version that was in 9.2; in general the further behind the core Kodi is from what's current, the more things I need to fiddle with to get things to work.

    Quote from callagg2

    As for getting a new device, do you really want to get a device now with a GPU that will be unable to decode AV1 video files that will be everywhere in a year or two. Personally I'm waiting for something like the Mecool Pro III with satellite/cable DVB tuners and AV1 hardware decoding (and obviously VP9/H265).

    I can almost certainly get a device that can CPU decode AV1 at 1080p (or will be able to when the AV1 decoders get more ARM optimizations, but I think dav1d can decode 1080p today), which is the resolution of my TV anyways

    Edited once, last by aidenn0 (July 9, 2020 at 7:06 PM).

    Quote from aidenn0

    There's lots of little annoyances; most recently I needed to find a way to upgrade InputStream Adaptive to a version that was in 9.2

    I have the same problem. I need InputStream Adaptive 2.4.5 for Odroid C2 with LibreElec 9.0.2. Did you find a way to solve this?