LibreELEC support for Raspberry Pi 5

    LibreELEC support for Raspberry Pi 5 - LibreELEC

    chewitt I will attempt to post some video of an RPi5 board in action sometime later today. The main challenge is that I'm currently in the UK with a slow internet connection and 1080p TV and all my test media and 4K HDR screen is at home 3,500 miles away. Please read the main announcement and if you have questions: put them below and staff with test boards will try to provide answers.

    EDIT: Here's a rather basic video: https://youtu.be/mYP3Vkysn38

    No hardware decoding for AV1 is a disappointment. No hardware decoding for H.264 is pretty weird as well, though probably not such a problem given the CPU performance.

    Quote from trent

    No hardware decoding for H.264 is pretty weird as well, though probably not such a problem given the CPU performance.

    It removes the max-1080p cap that RPi4 has and so far all the H264 4K media I have plays fine; although I'll self-admit that I have very little 4K H264 media since it's not a broadcast standard. Normal 1080p media is no issue at all.

    A bit on the fence to be honest, the RPi4 performs great, and I don't spend a lot of time in the menu. :)

    It would have been nice if there was a native on-board M.2 slot, but I would probably only use that for a desktop or server device. For LE, all of my content is on the NAS, and I just use SD cards to boot LE. I haven't seen a genuine SD card failure yet, but I already backup the configuration to the NAS. At this point I have 2 spare RPi4 boards, so probably won't be picking up any more until RPi6.

    I am sure we will see great device support from the Raspberry Pi team, it's really hard to beat the fact that you can open an issue on Github and they will address it.

    Quote from frakkin64

    I am sure we will see great device support from the Raspberry Pi team, it's really hard to beat the fact that you can open an issue on Github and they will address it.

    We've spotted a few regressions in the kernel and firmware in the last month or so as things have evolved. I'd guesstimate the average time from "first mention of problem" to "fix merged" is around 36h.

    Meanwhile an RK3588 fanbois in the Phoronix blog thread is telling me that RK3588 is better because (regarding kernel sources) "the community and Collabora are cleaning them up and exporting them to upstream. It's been a year and things are going well" .. which is roughly how long I've been saying "ask me again in six months" each time someone asks if LE supports RK3588.

    QED :D

    Quote from chewitt

    It's been a year and things are going well" .. which is roughly how long I've been saying "ask me again in six months" each time someone asks if LE supports RK3588.

    I know you are intimately aware of the Amlogic problems as well, and the difficulty of mainline support. It's quite a different story between paid engineers focused on the product versus unpaid volunteers/paid bounties to implement a feature. The open-source process is pretty difficult for the average user to engage in, especially that of the kernel, it's also a bit intimidating. No knock on folks working to pay their bills, but one of the problems is manufacturers hire consultants to implement the product into mainline, and once they feel it is "good enough" the cut them loose, and I am sure those guys feel some sense of responsibility for what they put out in the world but also need to eat -- so that code doesn't get the same level of support when they were paid to maintain it.

    Anyone that maintains open-source software for free is a real hero in my book.

    Quote from chewitt

    It removes the max-1080p cap that RPi4 has and so far all the H264 4K media I have plays fine; although I'll self-admit that I have very little 4K H264 media since it's not a broadcast standard. Normal 1080p media is no issue at all.

    If you try to use it as a "daily computer" - which I know is outside the remit of this forum - then the lack of decoders for H264, AV1, VP9 - will result in very bad web browsing experience.

    I have watched several reviews this morning and every time they visit Youtube it is visibly very bad.

    If Pi5 lasts as long as Pi4 - 4 years - then lack of AV1 decoding is going to be a glaring deficiency during it's life.

    I've posted a basic video on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/mYP3Vkysn38. As noted in the opening starwars crawl i'm in the wrong country at the moment so don't have access to demo a broad range of media content. The video covers H264 @ 1080p and 1080i and 4K30/4K60 VP9; the later plays but drops frames whereas the lower refresh-rate 4K30 content plays fine (the 4K30 content is intentionally slo-mo style). Where I bring up codec info you can see the H264 1080p/i media is using around 20-25% CPU.

    Quote from trent

    I have watched several reviews this morning and every time they visit Youtube it is visibly very bad.

    RPiOS has some big plumbing changes to handle with the incoming 'Bookworm' based release and there's new code that's functional but not optimised yet. For sure running a full desktop in the background will incure a penalty over the more minimalist use LE has, but I would expect to see a regular drip-feed of improvements once the dust settles on the board launch. It's not something I'm planning to track mind..

    Quote from JohnWayne111

    Will LE 11.0.3 run with a raspberry Pi 5 ?

    LE 11.0.3 pre-dates the RPi5 release, so no :)

    We are still thinking about if or how we include RPi5 support in LE 11 (eg 11.0.4).

    Background info: we've been testing with LE12, which runs entirely 64bit code and can take advantage of several nice optimizations (eg accelerated deinterlace) which are only available on 64bit.

    LE11 on RPi is entirely 32bit userspace code though. Adding 64bit support to it would open a can of worms (lots of the addons would need updates etc) so likely I'll have a look at doing a 32bit LE11 RPi5 build as this should be easier to achieve (fingers crossed).

    so long,

    Hias

    Yeah <3

    Time for next donation :)

    There’s absolutely no hurry getting LE to run on an RPI5. If the introduction of the RPI4 and the firmware fiasco is anything to go by you’ll need your iron plugged in 24/7.

    Such a shame users don’t enjoy the LE user’s experience a little more instead of worrying about the latest hardware it may or may not run on. Leave the developers to their own devices and no doubt when the time is right every user here will know when it’s all ready to go. I think many of these users have more money than sense.

    The blog post statement about 58 mins from DHL delivery to first-boot of a working image was me. The family used the first-boot image for a week without noticing I swapped the normal RPi4 for the RPi5 (and then I broke something with a crypto bump and unclean builds and incurred downtime, but that was nothing to do with RPi5). The codebase was already 90% complete long before Pi devs opened up the test group to wider testing. And while there's still lots going on in the kernel, all the media and DRM bits that LE care about most have minimal change from RPi4 so things are stable. TL/DR; RPi5 already runs fine and there's no firmware drama.