VideoStrong KII Pro S905 - No tv adapters

    Hello,

    Greetings for all people sharing their skills here.

    I need a help with my old box :)
    Pulled from trash my old VideoStrong KII Pro S905 box, DVB-T2 + DVB-S2 and installed last LE build 12.0.1 on it.
    Installed last TvHeadend service and client.
    Unfortunately Tv adapters node is empty. When trying to search channells in Kodi get a message "No of connected PVR backends supports scanning for channels".
    Seems it's a drivers problem.

    Tried all meson-gxbb-* dtb files. No success.

    The most promising meson-gxbb-kii-pro.dtb not even fully boot

    Any magician here to help?

    Best regards

    • Best Answer

    The 12.0.1 release notes that nobody reads describes some "no" items for the AMLGX image:

    • No support for updates from older LibreELEC and CE releases (clean install is mandatory)
    • No support for internal eMMC install on box hardware except WeTek Hub/Play2
    • No support for SSV6501 and S908CS WiFi chips
    • No drivers for in-box DVB tuners
    • No hardware deinterlacing
    • No HDR to SDR tonemapping

    The latest and last release that might support them is LE 9.0.1 although dtech has an LE 9.2.8 image that might also contain them (but I don't track it, so no guarantees). The upstream kernel in LE 12/13 has reasonable support for USB tuners.

    I made an effort about 2-years back to clean-up the Linux 3.14 era drivers so they compiled against a modern kernel. These can be found here: https://github.com/chewitt/linux/commits/dvb-sucks and I rebased them against Linux 6.12.y only last week. However there's no Amlogic demux driver in the upstream kernel (which is essential) and we need tuner/demod drivers to be independent rather than interdependent so we can describe a box configuration in device-tree rather than compiling everything into a single monolithic driver as the Amlogic vendor kernel does. The monolithic approach works for box manufacturers who need to support a single box with a single driver recipe, but doesn't work or scale when you need to support a range of devices; each with a different tuner/demod/demux driver combo.

    It's not a huge amount of work to get done, but it takes a certain skillset and mindset to hande the code archaeology and writing of modern kernel drivers. It's already been 'years' and nobody volunteered, so I have low expectations of it ever happening.