Status of Old AML TV Boxes

    I am slightly confused as to the status of old TV boxes like the wetek play 2. I thought it was EOL but then I see this:

    LibreELEC-AMLGX.arm-11.0-nightly-20220531-0e57a30-wetek-play2.img.gz 114.8 MiB 2022-May

    Apart from them being test builds suffering from the usual issues of testing environment is this by mistake?

    WP2 is usable with the LE11 codebase based on upstream Linux (currently 5.18.0); albeit with no support for the DVB tuners inside (as there is no support for them upstream) and HEVC decoding being a little unpolished. H264 is good, other codecs are mostly software decoded but that isn't a big deal. NB: That specific image contains upstream u-boot and to use it you must completely erase Android from the internal emmc storage while the "box" image can boot using the vendor u-boot that comes with Android on the emmc storage. Neither WP2 or box image can update an existing image/SD card, a new/clean one is required.

    It's not clear/decided whether Amlogic support is formally resurrected for LE11 as newer hardware has some major issues to solve, but there are no plans to stop nightlies.

    All three problems you listed aren't issues for me. As long as there is networking support, I am not fussed if Kodi works properly or not. I want to salvage the box to use as a home server, using docker, Plex etc to serve my other media players.

    As per your second comment about uboot, are there any instructions on how I would do this?

    Quote from chewitt

    https://wiki.libreelec.tv/hardware/amlogic

    Thank you. I meant more specifically about wiping the uboot to boot new type image. I think there are some forum post dotted around that tell you to "zero" the partition. Am i correct in understanding that you can wipe the vendor uboot and upon first boot of libreelec image it installs a new u-boot that is compatible with both libreelec and any android installation you may install?

    Also is your 10.8.5 image more "stable" than the nightly?

    The S905 chip requires magic boot code in the first sector of emmc which is the same location for partition records, so in theory you can't have modern u-boot on emmc and then boot an OS that needs to read partition data from the same location; they are mutually exclusive. SD cards boot from a different offset which isn't an issue. So the box must boot from SD card and the only way to force that is to erase vendor u-boot from eMMC (else it's detected and used). NB: The Odroid C2 has some special boot firmware that solves this, but the firmware is packaged to hide how it's done and nobody ever figured it out.

    As the WP2 is going to boot LE11 from SD card in all scenarios there's not much difference between using the "box" image via vendor u-boot and the upstream u-boot image. See if the "box" image fits your needs first before doing anything more.

    Code
    cd /storage
wget https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreELEC-AMLGX.arm-10.85.0-wetek-play2.img.gz
emmctool w LibreELEC-AMLGX.arm-10.85.0-wetek-play2.img.gz

    If you're feeling brave, some figuring out happened and that image ^ should result in a WP2 box that boots and runs LE with upstream u-boot from internal storage instead of SD card :)