Posts by chewitt

Any chance you can run some tests anyway? .. I made a device-tree file for it, so it would be good to know if it works or not.

I'm not sure anyone has tested with an S905W2 chip so you'll have to go first and let us know. I would start with "meson-sm1-a95xf3-air.dtb" in uEnv.ini as that's quite simple hardware and probably a close match. I've no idea what WiFi module is in the box so it will be Ethernet only until someone shares some close-up photo's of the board inside. The Android boot log would also be useful.

Quote from frakkin64

Is Amlogic actually upstreaming any of their newer devices? Or are they going the Realtek route?

Amlogic recently started upstreaming support for S805X2 which is one of their latest budget chips, but it's a cut-down version of S905X4 so in theory that should be useful - they are still making the decision about whether to upstream S905X4 too, but the differences shouldn't be too significant so I hope they do. Regarless, it will be a slow process as their downstream code style is often old/outdated and overal quality is low so it takes many iterations of patches to raise standards to the point where the kernel maintainers will accept things. I'm also expecting them to focus on support for the core board systems only and make no attempt to upstream the media parts. That's a good/bad thing; it's it's the thing we need most, but their downstream drivers are extremely complicated with lots of features and the lack of anything upstream creates the opportunity to apply the "less is more" principle and implement only the capbilities we actually need. Anyway, it's early days and I don't expect to boot LE images on latest generation hardware anytime soon.

Quote from tomaszc

Some time ago, there was a post on LibreElec and Collabora Twitter about work on a driver for Mali T760 and newer. If the driver is created and working, will it be possible to hardware decode without HEVC, just using this driver ( something like hwdec=auto in mpv) and solve the video rewind issues? - I don't quite understand how currently HEVC uses GPU hardware decoding if we don't have drivers.

No. In the x86 world the "Graphics Card" sort of combines everything into one device. In the ARM world GPU and VDEC are totally separate things. In an Amlogic box the Mali GPU (Panfrost or Lima drivers which are upstream and work great) accelerates rendering of the Kodi GUI via OpenGLES (squares and triangles are being drawn on the screen via maths) and an IP block on the core SoC (S905 etc.) decodes video frames for rasterising to a DRM (digital rendering manager) device like an HDMI tranceiver.

Fixing HEVC is going to be a lot of work as the older and newer hardware generations are quite different. I'm not going to go into too many details just yet, but there is a plan of sorts forming on how to get some of the outstandinig issues resolved (and who will do the work). It's unlikely to be quick though, so we have to be a little patient.

The specs I found online suggest it has the SSV6051P WiFi chip. If true it is not supported and won't ever be - we have sources for the driver but they are ugly code (easily the worst legacy driver code we've seen) and will not compile on any kernel newer than Linux 4.11 without a major rewrite that nobody sane is going to volunteer for. Plan B is to use a USB WiFi stick (avoid Realtek ones). Plan C is a WiFi bridge that presents Ethernet to the box via a short cable. I use an old Apple Aïrport express like this during board/box testing as (even with boxes that have supported WiFi chips) it eliminates the need to configure WiFi to get online.

I've no idea where the reset button is, but the normal locations we see with cheap TV boxes are either between the air-holes/grille on the underside of the box, or down the bottom of the 3.5mm AV jack.

One of the USB ports is probably an OTG port that can be connected to a PC to flash the eMMC with an Android image via Amlogic burning tool .. but I have no advice on what image to use.

The message that appears on-screen is indeeed harmless and can be ignored. No harm in adding nomodeset to the boot config .. but we don't use grub unless it's a 32-bit BIOS (as indicated by the SYSLINUX header in the pic). Similar place to modify, but not actually grub.

It's a rainy Sunday here (doesn't happen often) so there is now a "meson-gxl-s905w-mecool-m8s-pro-w.dtb" device-tree and an untested IR keymap in the "box" image. See how it goes and report back.

"Allow hardware acceleration" does not mean "only allow" .. it means we will use it when it's technically possible. As GDPR-7 said, not all hardware will support all media/codec types for hardware decode, and when something is not possible we fall back to software (CPU) decode which will generate heat .. and that's when people regret choosing boxes with cooling fans instead of a large passive heatsink

Google restricts the number of Google API searches that can be made per-day with applications. Developers of registered Google API using apps can purchase access to higher numbers of searches, or they can request a free bump to higher tiers and then it's up to Google to grant the request. The net result is .. both the YouTube and Tubed add-ons are wildly more popular than the current tier of requests allowed, and when the free quota is used you see the warning. Neither add-on is going to pay for searches, so the workaround is for you to register with Google for a personal developer account, and then you can have your own API keys with their own quota. You will find instructions for this online. Once you get YouTube add-on working Tubed can/will use the same API key files. It sucks, but unless Google decides to grant Tubed a larger quota, there is nothing the developers (or LE, or Kodi) can do.

You can create a new SD card from https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreE…85.0-box.img.gz and as a starting point, set the dtb name to "meson-gxl-s905w-p281.dtb" in uEnv.ini. You may need to force recovery boot again for the SD card to be read. The SSV6051 WiFi chip is not supported in the upstream codebase that LE uses (and no hope of that changing) but Ethernet should work. The IR remote will need a keymap creating, but once you get the box booting the LE image it's not hard to capture the IR codes and then I can add that. If you do not have a USB keyboard to complete the first-run wizard with you, can always force SSH on by adding "ssh" to boot params in uEnv.ini.

NB: This is an LE11/Nexus (pre-Alpha) image. There are no LE10/Matrix images .. and this is LE not CE. The upstream codebase is still a little experimental, but works quite well on older GXL hardware.

I updated the wiki page, but the root issue is that the files are hosted on third party mirror servers that don't always support https, so we need to downgrade the links to http at some point.

Quote from markturnip

Seems like an ideal device for our requirements, for it's performance & high quality DAC RCA outputs

I have a BPI-W2 with the same RTD1296 SoC from experiments a couple of years ago. It wasn't bad hardware in its day, but the challenge is software. There is almost zero support in the upstream kernel and the vendor sources are both ancient and horrificly ugly. That means no chance of an LE image. There was an effort to upstream things https://github.com/afaerber/linux/tree/rtd1295-next but it appears to have fizzled out, and since the hardware is now ageing I doubt it will resume.

Most Kodi repo provided add-ons are either available in Nexus specific versions or are Matrix compatible. For non-Kodi add-ons but most Matrix add-ons will probably work fine. You can install Greek under Kodi settings > Interface > Regional > Language.

It sounds like the issue with expired CA details in the TLS certificate chain. Have a read here RE: Cannot Install/Update Addons

Quote from loki7777

Just got the box and after few hours i read your post again and now i have it working but wifi is not working at all?

jernej and MartinB are in the process of writing support for the SDIO version of RTL8822CS in the rtw88 driver. Once some patches hit the mailing list I will backport them into images. Until then the WiFi is not supported on those boxes.

No logs = No problem

LE10 uses Linux 5.10 kernel and support for the latest Intel chips/GPUs was still WIP at the time 5.10 shipped. If you update to a current LE11 nightly image from: https://test.libreelec.net the latest kernels (5.15, and we bumped to 5.16 last night) should have support. Nightlies are running pre-Alpha Kodi Nexus but should be fairly stable to use.

LE 9.2.8 exists for Slice3 users with some changes that were needed for widevine support. If you don't use Netflix/Amazon or similar there's no need to update. There are no dedicated Slice3 images for LE10/LE11 but you should be able to cross-grade to RPi2 .. although we have not formally made an RPi2 image yet (maybe soon, for 10.0.2). LE10/LE11 images will be missing support for 3D and software optimised HEVC playback so if you need either of those it'll be best to remain on LE 9.2.x. Anyone with an original CM(1) board will want to remain on the legacy images as those run better on the older/lower spec.

NB: I shipped my Slice3 box to HiassofT last year. I'm not expecting him to do much/anything with it, but at least our primary RPi image maintainer has a sample box. If someone reports breakage at least he'll be able to test it.