If the supply/demand ratio is as small for the Rpi5 as its been for the Rpi4, most of use won't get our hands on one for another year...
RPi5 will probably have an initial rush of orders and sell out, but within a month or so stocks should be back to normal again. RPi4 is generally available everywhere now, the supply issues have been resolved. See https://rpilocator.com/?cat=PI4
What should I do to get these dependencies?
Python2 support only exists in LE 9.2.x releases. LE10 and up use Python3 exclusively. You probably need to find a newer Python3 compatible version of the add-ons.
That warning is harmless and irrelevant because LE only uses pulseaudio for BT connections and everything else is native alsa. HDMI cardsnormaly have several card presentations to the OS including an analogue one; which will never support pass-through. Put Kodi in debug mode, restart, than "pastekodi" the entire logfile and share the URL; little snippets are rarely useful.
AIUI there are reports that h.264 2160p content encoded at the kind of bitrates used for web-based content are decoding in software - at least at 2160p24 level. 1080p h.264/VC-1/AV1 all software decodes OK too I believe.
Correct. I struggle to find 4K H264 materials, but what I've accumulated over time plays fine and users are welcome to share 30 second clips of specific media for us to experiment with if they like.
I'm wondering if the latest hardware iteration of RPi3B+ requires newer boot firmware than the LE 9.2.8 image contains (we see similar things with the RPi4). Create an 9.2.8 SD card and then copy/paste the startup/fixup files from a current LE12 nightly image and see if that makes a difference?
I guess you have to downgrade LE to get the right NVIDIA driver: Click!
You can ignore that. It's just default log spam when the Xorg and driver ABI versions aren't quite aligned. If you get output (Kodi starts) things are working enough to ignore the warning.
I'd go back to the LE10 image and run "systemd-analyze plot > /storage/boot.svg" and then export the .svg file generated and open it in a browser. It will show a graphical display of the boot process and might flag where something's hanging and/or timing out.
video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60^ add that to boot params in cmdline.txt (all on the same line) .. any better?
Can you confirm that it has HDMI-cec?
It was a key factor in selecting the current Pi4
Yes, that's unchanged from RPi4.
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.
Passthrough of a digital signal requires a digital output (HDMI or S/PDIF). That's an an Analogue output.
The error to mount is normally caused by the filesystem being marked/detected as "dirty" meaning it has errors. Make sure the card is unmounted cleanly in Windows (or whatever OS the SD card was created from) before removing the SD card, as that can be the cause. The 32MB /storage partition will be automatically deleted and recreated at 100% size during first-boot.
LE has a limited number of pre-built add-ons to install things specific to LE or that are useful on a mediacentre HTPC box. If you need anything more we support Docker, which opens up lots of opportunities to run other apps/code in containers.
chewitt - sorry to tell you but YouTube have removed the video - you're apparently violating their terms of service.
I think their algorithm detects Kodi and assumes piracy. I've appealed it.
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..
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.
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 
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.
Xorg start runs a script to detect the primary GPU and symlink the appropriate libs needed for that GPU flavour to work.
