Boblight with hardware decoding

    Is there a way to get boblight working with hardware decoding (platforms I'm testing are Odroid C2, Raspberry Pi 3 and 4)?

    It has to work fine on OSMC some time ago, and stopped with some update. Now I want to run my multimedia center with all features, and one of them is Amblone instalation, serviced by Boblightd on Linux. This part works fine. Problem is with playing videos (the most important thing) - when I enable DRM PRIME hardware acceleration, boblight doesn't work. When I disable DRM - boblight works fine, but performance is very poor (as the video is decoded by software). I guess the problem is with DRM (some protection that avoid boblight to get image), because some time ago Kodi didn't support that (I don't know if it stopped working with version that came with DRM support, but it is possible).

    Is there any way to get it both (Boblight AND hardware decoding)?

    Quote

    Is there any way to get it both (Boblight AND hardware decoding)?

    Yes/No. Devices that run GBM/DRMPRIME graphics do not support software grabbers at the current time, and I have low expectation of that changing anytime soon as it will be a non-trivial feature to implement. Ambilight/Boblight setups either need to stick with older images that use legacy display pipelines, or switch to an external HDMI grabber (which being a hardware solution, has no dependency on software).

    Quote from chewitt

    external HDMI grabber

    You mean HDMI splitter + some USB dongle to capture HDMI video? That would be very expensive soultion. Or there is some cheap dedicated stuff?...

    Quote from chewitt

    Devices that run GBM/DRMPRIME graphics do not support software grabbers

    Do any of supported by LibreELEC single board computers support hardware decoding with software grabbers?

    And, from Hyperion Github:

    Quote

    There is an outstanding Kodi fix for that.

    Now I understand how much that mean :)

    It looks like it is the end of my Odroid C2 tests as multimedia center. Working boblight was my mistake, 5.1 sound won't work for me and additional SPDIF output is probably much more complicated than described in their website.

    Quote from Da Flex

    Not so fast. As mentioned, chewitt also has a C2, so stay tuned until he did some testings.

    I'm not throwing away this board and I'll be very happy to hear it work :) but at this moment I see no benefit over Raspberry Pi (where sound works) - boblight has same problems, secondary sound output has unknown status (for Raspberry Pi I have HiFi-Berry, which sounds great, and the only problem is to configure system to stream sound via two sound cards at the same time - I have done it on OSMC, but it stopped to work with some update, and simply copying my configuration to LibreELEC doesn't work too).

    Not sure how advanced your needs are to the external grabber, but they might not be as expensive as you think.

    You might want to check the hyperion forum for working grabbers.

    I was lucky, as I had an older LG TV which was rootable and I was able to install PicCap.

    Just wanted to hilight that in case you are lucky too and you are brave enough. I was REALLY scared but it worked out.

    Fingers crossed that your wall will shine again very soon :P

    Edited once, last by Bub4 (September 12, 2023 at 9:59 PM).

    I have even older LG TV - before smart TV era. But it works well (which is good information for all LG TV owners) and I don't want to change it. So this is not an option.

    About grabbers and splitters - well, grabber can be not as expensive. Splitter - probably will be problematic (and expensive too), if I want to use HDMI CEC.