Posts by chewitt

    Wrappers aren't the right approach because the level of optimisation required for functional 4K pipelines on ARM hardware is high and you'll always end up needing to write efficient native drivers. You can bodge 1080p, but RAM speed and bandwidth become big factors with 4K. The tertiary challenge with V4L2 is that it's all super new and still in a lot of flux; we're still some way from making a serious effort to upstream our current working code to ffmpeg because lots of things are still being experimented on.

    Practically all 4K content is HEVC (or VP9) encoded and nVidia never added support for either to their Linux drivers, hence the CPU is working overtime to play back 4K content. AMD and Intel have both invested time/effort in their drivers (and both use Kodi as a reference media app) so support is generally good and the main Linux challenge is new chips needing bleeding edge kernels that take a while to stabilise. nVidia continues to be a Linux pariah and future use in LE once we drop X11 support (sooner than later) is not guaranteed. Stats show the number of nVidia users continues to decline and most of them have older cards. These days most people have moved from homebrew boxes to NUC-like devices with a server/NAS for media in the network. Most of those devices are fanless (or quiet enough) and the client/server setup makes it easier and cheaper to upgrade the client device as media tastes evolve over time. Perhaps convert the current box to a server and partner it with an RPi4?

    Clean install the current nightly from Index of / with no 4K60 configuration and prove things work normally and the RPi4 can see 4K (up to 30) modes - right now it is only seeing 1080p. That suggests bad or inadequate/uncertified HDMI cables (or broken EDID from the TV) or using the wrong HDMI port on the TV. Note that LE defaults to 1080@60 GUI even if the TV supports 4K playback. Rendering the GUI is about CPU performance, it is not hardware accelerated like 4K video, so the GUI will be noticeably slower if you force it to run at 4K. You can still whitelist 4K modes for playback and Kodi will switch to 4K when required. Also note that practically all 4K media is [email protected]/25/30 so in most cases, users do not require 4K60 to be forced.

    If vendor boot firmware is present on emmc the box will always boot from it, so to freely experiment with other boot firmware(s) from an SD card or USB stick you will need to completely erase emmc. If the goal is to run the dtech image you should focus on finding a replcement "vendor" u-boot. NB: the u-boot.bin.sd.bin files in my share (in case that's what you found) are mainline u-boot variants and might boot the box but will not greatly help in any mission involving 3.14 vendor kernels. Start by sharing the "strange characters and letters/numbers" seen via UART via pastebin so people can understand what the current boot-state of the device is.

    GitHub shows no commit activity from Thoradia since Jan this year. We have zero contact with him/her/they outside of this forum so we have no way to enquire about future plans. at this point people should assume that this thread (and the repo) is dead.

    Now I ask you: is it possible to somehow install LE directly on the nand via aml usb burning, or via usb / sd

    Amlogic Burning Tool = No (our .img is not the format used by that tool). USB/SD = You can boot from SD/USB but we provide no tools for internal install (the box has emmc btw, not nand but that doesn't change anything) and you will need working vendor u-boot on the box to boot into LE (or CE, which is probably a better option for clone box). Currently there are no LE releases for this kind of box.

    Martin Blumenstingl and I both have Core boxes now (Martin having one is vastly more important - esp. since I have littl time for Amlogic fiddling at the moment). Meson8 devices now have working HDMI (1080p) and initial audio support is on the mailing list so platform support has progressed. You can forget LE10 support, LE11 might be more realistic for alpha support; although Meson8 devices will soon be stuck at the same incomplete vdec support as all the newer Amlogic hardware versions. Most of the current activity originates from Lakka/Batocera devs as the S812 chip has a reputation for great performance .. and gaming doesn't need fancy stuff like vdec/4K etc.

    If you flashed a ROM built from boot FIPs with the wrong acs.bin for the RAM in the box (acs.bin has the RAM timing data) the early boot stage will not be able to reach the point where u-boot loads; so it errors and cycles to try again (ad infinitum). To get past this you need to prevent the eMMC being detected, because if it's detected, it's used. The "nice" ways to override the boot logic are an Amlogic SDIO debug board (almost nobody has one) or custom HDMI dongle (almost nobody has one) or you need the "less nice" shorting pins on the eMMC chip method. It's ugly but it temporarily disables eMMC and the boot logic then looks for u-boot on an SD Card or USB stick.

    The next steps involve experiments with shorting the correct pins and different u-boot(s) on SD cards so basically you need to UART hooked up to see what works and what doesn't work. It's fiddly but not actually that complicated once you mentally get over the idea of stuffing a screwdriver into your expensive cicruit board :)

    I wouldn't "rm .kodi" as that prevents you from easily copying back all the bits that don't cause issues. Simple "mv .kodi .kodi-old" and then reboot to update is fine. You can keep DB files, sources.xml, thumbnail caches and add-on settings without problems.