Chromium, Firefox, RetroArch, SuperTuxKart and Terminal addons for LE13

    Quote from Eli2k

    Thanks, it works pretty well :)
    now we need Retrodeck to make the experience perfect :)

    Feel free to give it a try and report back if it works (note: according to the flathub page it's not available for aarch64, only x86_64 is listed).

    ssh in and run "flatpak install flathub net.retrodeck.retrodeck", then try to start it directly from the flatpak addon.

    so long,

    Hias

    Quote from HiassofT

    Feel free to give it a try and report back if it works (note: according to the flathub page it's not available for aarch64, only x86_64 is listed).

    ssh in and run "flatpak install flathub net.retrodeck.retrodeck", then try to start it directly from the flatpak addon.

    so long,

    Hias

    You're completely right, I'll try it with Pegasus instead:

    Install Pegasus on Linux | Flathub
    Cross platform, customizable graphical frontend for launching emulators
    flathub.org

    Quick heads up:

    Google finally released Chrome for 64bit ARM and it's now available in our addon repo.

    It should also support widevine (usually it's installed via chrome's component updates) so Netflix etc should work with it, too.

    If you update Chromium (use the update function of the Flatpak addon) you should also be able to get widevine working.

    I haven't been able to verify that myself (as I'm currently away from home), but in the past widevine was installed when you first visited a (streaming-) site that required DRM and then you needed to restart Chrome/Chromium to actually get it working - so try that, too, if it doesn't work at first try.

    so long,

    Hias

    First of all, an enormous thank you to the developer of this. I deem this an absolute game changer.

    A couple of questions:

    1) I am trying VacuumTube on a Nuc 11 i3. I can't seem to be able to activate HDR playback on HDR videos. I've read reports of people managing to do so and I *think* they were using an AMD GPU for this. Is Intel not capable of this with VacuumTube, for whatever reason? Nuc 11 i3 outputs HDR in regular Kodi (and now Dolby Vision). I have tried with the Wayland HDR setting both on and off.

    2) I've discovered the External programs helper addon and found the option to change resolution. If one wants to change other things, like mouse speed or whatever else... is it something doable by modifying the addon files somehow? Or is there a configuration file somewhere one can edit, with linux commands or whatever? I am absolutely not familiar with how Flatpaks work, so I might be asking for something that is technically impossible. Sorry in advance if so.

    The wayland compositor we currently use (cage) doesn't support HDR (yet).

    We are (more precisely CvH is) currently looking at using labwc instead, which should support HDR.

    ATM the only things you can change are the display resolution (with the latest addon updates also independently for each flatpak addon) and a few audio settings.

    Keyboard layout and the audio device are taken from kodi's settings.

    We'll have to think about if/how to add more settings, but we also need to be careful that we don't overcomplicate things.

    so long,

    Hias

    Quote from HiassofT

    The wayland compositor we currently use (cage) doesn't support HDR (yet).

    We are (more precisely CvH is) currently looking at using labwc instead, which should support HDR.

    ATM the only things you can change are the display resolution (with the latest addon updates also independently for each flatpak addon) and a few audio settings.

    Keyboard layout and the audio device are taken from kodi's settings.

    We'll have to think about if/how to add more settings, but we also need to be careful that we don't overcomplicate things.

    Thanks a lot for the thorough reply. I absolutely agree in not overcomplicating things (which is why I thought maybe extra settings were located in config files for advanced users that care about them). All in all, I think two worthy additions would be HDR (for sure) and multichannel audio (there's a few videos on YT that exploit this capability, don't know if it's exposed in any Leanback device implementation, so I'm not entirely sure this would be possible at all, as opposed to HDR).

    Quote from ashlar

    All in all, I think two worthy additions would be HDR (for sure) and multichannel audio (there's a few videos on YT that exploit this capability, don't know if it's exposed in any Leanback device implementation, so I'm not entirely sure this would be possible at all, as opposed to HDR).

    I recently added support for multichannel audio, but so far only for the Moonlight addon.

    If you are running the latest nightly image and the latest addon versions you can easily test it yourself:

    modify the "start" line of the flatpak addon's default.py file and add "pulseaudio_channels=6"

    eg /storage/.kodi/addons/flatpak.vacuumtube/default.py:

    Code
    flatpak.start(args=['--no-sandbox'], pulseaudio_channels=6)

    Please report back if this worked, then we can enable the audio setting in vacuumtube (or other addons that support multichannel), too.

    so long,

    Hias

    VacuumTube just doesn't support multichannel audio, the dev has tried to get it working but never did.

    If you really want it you can try this fork of the YouTube add-on https://github.com/scsion/CoreTube it works fine in LibreElec, and doesn't need the API keys like the original add-on. It's not a slick as the proper Leanback interface but it's pretty good.

    Quote from HiassofT
    Code
    flatpak.start(args=['--no-sandbox'], pulseaudio_channels=6)

    Please report back if this worked, then we can enable the audio setting in vacuumtube (or other addons that support multichannel), too.

    Tested this. What happens is that everything is outputted as 6 channels audio, with mixing happening inside the LE machine. I activated the "Direct" decoding on my AVR (Denon X3800H). When in Kodi, if I play back a stereo source, the AVR displays "Stereo" and pushing the Info button on its remote shows that the source has only Front Left and Front Right speakers content. Again, in Kodi, if I play back a multichannel source (a movie with FLAC 5.1 sound), the AVR displays "Multi Channel Input" and the Info button shows content from source for Fronts, Center, Surrounds and Subwoofers channels.

    With that pulseaudio_channels=6 flag, for all VacuumTube content the AVR displays "Multi Channel Input" and source content for Fronts, Center, Surrounds and Subwoofer channels. This includes stereo tracks. So the machine (not the AVR) is upmixing stereo to 5.1. And when playing content on YouTube that has real 5.1 content (typically sent as EAC3), the audio codec remains Opus at 251kbps.

    Which LE image are you running? Upmixing was recently disabled - so audio output should have been 6ch but only left and right having audio, the other channels silent.

    so long,

    Hias

    Quote from HiassofT

    Which LE image are you running? Upmixing was recently disabled - so audio output should have been 6ch but only left and right having audio, the other channels silent.

    so long,

    Hias

    Oh, sorry, I was not aware of that. I am using this specific build (maybe you know where to look in order to check whether that specific commit is included or not): https://github.com/CroqueMr/libre…0.0-RC4-Preview

    Although the fact that Opus was used as audio codec probably points to what nissel mentioned above, that is VacuumTube still unable to "transmit" its multichannel capabilities to YouTube leanback.

    Quote from ashlar

    Oh, sorry, I was not aware of that. I am using this specific build (maybe you know where to look in order to check whether that specific commit is included or not): https://github.com/CroqueMr/libre…0.0-RC4-Preview

    Although the fact that Opus was used as audio codec probably points to what nissel mentioned above, that is VacuumTube still unable to "transmit" its multichannel capabilities to YouTube leanback.

    worth a try to see if multichannel works on youtube.com/tv (leanback, install extension to get it to work on browser)
    if it works then get chatGPT and figure it ourself, I've done that and got further than dev on something, though not tested on all platforms.

    Quote from hcliec001

    worth a try to see if multichannel works on youtube.com/tv (leanback, install extension to get it to work on browser)
    if it works then get chatGPT and figure it ourself, I've done that and got further than dev on something, though not tested on all platforms.

    I did a bit of testing, from a Windows 10 machine (connected to the same AVR). With the firefox extension I did not have much luck.

    Tried with Ungoogled Chromium and installed this extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube…gphaeikombjmnkh

    This video: https://www.youtube.com/tv#/watch?v=9rQmFHapxEs had actual 5.1 content, using Opus multichannel at 773kbps. Other videos from the same channel gave the same result, such as:

    YouTube TV

    YouTube TV

    and others.
    Other videos from the same channel were streaming as Opus stereo 251kbps, such as this:

    YouTube TV

    But the same video, from an Android box using Smart Tube, was outputting EAC3 5.1 audio.

    Probably a sufficiently advanced AI model could make something out of this.

    EDIT
    To offer an additional element of info: on Smart Tube I have never ever seen a multichannel Opus 773kbps audio stream. It was always EAC3 when multichannel was present. Opus multichannel maybe is reserved for scenarios where the platform is unsure about a Dolby decoder being present in the playback chain?