Posts by tomaszc

I usually don't watch 4K and have hardware decoding turned off. But occasionally something will hit, or I test myself short demos in 4K and HDR, or without HDR. These are mostly h246 and h265 but vp9 also happens. It seemed to me that lately the scrolling works a little better with hardware decoding enabled.
Moments after writing the previous post, unfortunately the whole system crashed. This happens as you switch between videos with different codecs, and as far as I know this is a known problem.

Is there still any hope that someday it will work better on the S912?
Of course I don't expect anything, I'm just asking out of curiosity.
By the way, thank you for your work.

chewitt Are there any changes in video decoding in your latest compilation with kernel 6.9.0-rc5? It seems to me that it works more stable with hardware decoding enabled for 4K video. Is it better to use Direct to Plane or EGL?

I am using a Tv Box with Amlogic S912.

chewitt Do you know anything new about the progress of the hardware decoder for Amlogic? (It was mentioned in the LE 11 thread and at the beginning of this thread)

I'm currently using the official test releases, if I upgrade to your version on the new U-Boot is it also possible to easily revert to the official version in case of problems?

chewitt Yes, aarch64. I confused arm with x86

I see that the image is already built. I checked it and it works. Thank you!

chewitt

I see that your experimental releases are already available for 64 bit. Will Amlogic's official nightly releases migrate to the x86-64 architecture? Is there anything stopping this from happening? I'm just asking out of curiosity.

Do you know anything new about the progress of the hardware decoder for Amlogic, which you wrote about in the LE 11 thread?

From your post above, I assume that there are no plans to switch to 64-bit architecture for LE11?

Are there any such plans for official test releases of LE12?

I tested the official test and your LE12 (aarch64) images, but I encountered problems with hanging on some videos (e.g. some YouTube videos.), so I went back to LE11 and will wait to see how the situation develops in some time.

Thank you for your work on the transition to Kodi 64bit for Amlogic and overall LE development

Quote from chewitt

I'm effectively on hiatus; currently focussed on a new job and preparing for an Ironman triathlon later in the year. There is allegedly someone working on the hardware decoders (funded work from an LE friendly board manufacturer) so if/when that ever results in some interesting code to test in a public repo I'll think about resuming. Until then nightlies should have K21 alpha code and aarch64 kernels.

Do you know anything more about this company and this project?

Thank you for your reply. Good luck on the triathlon.

chewitt

Are you planning to build LibreElec with kodi 64bit (version 20.1 or dev) for Amlogic?

Raspberry Pi users have noticed some performance gains, I'm curious how it would look on TV BOX with s912.

I follow https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing but there are no new images there for a long time.

Just a humble question, please don't take it as an expectation.

Thank you for your work on this project.

chewitt Are there LibreElec 12 dev test images for Amlogic with userspace 64bit available somewhere?

Quote from chewitt

...

One change that will happen in LE12 is a switch from arm to aarch64 userspace as 64-bit widevine libs have finally appeared.

...

I'm not expecting much progress to happen on hardware decoders in the near future though.

I'm curious how this is resolved now? Because the system reports in uname that it is aarch64 (I have a s912). Is this 32 bit Kodi running under a 64 bit system? It looks like it is, because the file on kodi.bin shows ELF 32-bit LSB executable

Is there any benefit to switching to aarch64 other than tidiness? Is it known when such a change is planned ? or will it be as soon as images for Amlogic appear in https://test.libreelec.tv/12.0/ ?

It's a pity that you can't expect any improvement in hardware decoding under s912 in the near future, I hope it will improve one day.

In January there were changes that improved the search under hardware decoding but personally I have not noticed any improvement, practically every time you try to rewind (and also change the video language) artifacts appear and you have to stop and restart the video.

But I'm still happy with the handling of my s912 under LibreElec, it saved it from the end of its life. And I use hardware decoding anyway, because it makes the hardware much less heated.

Let me just clarify that the above is not pretensions or expectations, I am grateful for the development of this project giving a second life to the s912.

I see that night releases have started to use Kodi Omega, I do not want to use them because the plugins will probably cease to be compatible. That being said, I have questions about whether the images on https://libreelec.tv/downloads/amlogic/ will be updated with current improvements? For example, if there was an improvement in hardware decoding under Amlogic would it go into LibreElec 11?

Quote from chewitt

The AMLGX images in https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/ have experimental FFMpeg changes that improve seeking with HEVC media. It's not "fixed" but moves things from a 2/10 score to around 7/10 which is nice. I've also disabled the broken MPEG2 hardware decoder so content is software decoded. Linux 6.1.4 and almost final Kodi Nexus. NB: No change to G12A/B and SM1 support (still problematic).

Are these FFMpeg changes already in the last image on test.libreelec.tv or only on chewitt.libreelec.tv?

Would you mind writing who is behind these changes, someone has taken it upon themselves to fix it, or maybe it's to your credit?

Is this change any chance to fix rewinding on Amlogic S912 with DRM PRIME hardware acceleration enabled?

[le11] ffmpeg: fix version output by SupervisedThinking · Pull Request #6880 · LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv

This PR picks up the pkg version & writes it to the RELEASE / VERSION file which is picked up by the ffmpeg build before FFmpeg version/source:…

github.com

Quote from heitbaum

New version available on test.libreelec.com now - latest kernel. There was a breaking change that requires the binary addons to be reinstalled.

See RE: LibreELEC-RPi2.arm-11.0-nightly-20220723-Boot loop after Kodi image for some more info.

Thank you, it works!

I reinstalled all the binary plugins (at least the ones I knew were binary) and the video widevine works again

On my device with S912 from version LibreELEC-AMLGX.arm-11.0-nightly-20220722-0da8a26-box.img.gz does not work playing video with InputStream Adaptive from Widevine. It crashes Kodi completely.

I have checked several intermediate versions, including the latest 20220801-758bccf-box, and there is also this problem. The latest working version is 20220721-aa82c1a-box

Could someone else with such a device check it out?

The test can be done with the plugin: https://github.com/matthuisman/sl…in.video.tester or any other using InputStream Adaptive from Widevine, I tested on three different ones and the effect was the same.

Quote from chewitt

There's no need, you can update from .img files too.

Thanks, it works! I didn't know about this and until now I was manually extracting the kernel and system from the img and replacing

Are there plans to make the .tar pack available again for nightly release updates?

chewitt

Would there be a chance to update InputStream Adaptive to the latest version (20.2.2-Nexus) in your images or official test images?

The latest version fixes a regression bug: https://github.com/xbmc/inputstream.adaptive/issues/1003

Because of it I couldn't update LibreElec because it was breaking up the playback on some plugins.