Posts by chewitt

RPi3 is using video driver code honed over seven years and millions of installs. RPi4 is using different video drivers that have been around for about nine months (if you include the alpha period) and things are still being fettled into good shape.Things continue to improve over time and with each bump in firmware and drivers.

Quote from chelobaka

Speaking about Panfrost progress: it's really nice to see what those guys achieved during such short period. If they continue their efforts and move to Bitfrost driver (as they stated before), we should be able to run Mesa on latest Amlogic hardware. Though there is one more milestone to reach to get fully open source LE on Amlogic — H.265 10-bit decoder. I would even consider a donation to this goal if there's a fundraiser.

Panfrost is mostly an all-girl effort and she's 17-years old with a very bright future ahead of her. We have been using it for S912 support for 6+ months now and T820 support recently achieved "all green" on mesa dEQP tests which puts it broadly on-part with the ARM blob - and in some performance tests it completely outperforms the closed-source blob. Panfrost has been checking milestones off but the future direction isn't clear at the moment, i.e. whether development will continue to focus on other aspects of midgard support (OpenCL etc.) or whether they'll start to poke bifrost. Mali blobs exist for bifrost though, so there's no rush. Elsewhere in the LE codebase we've just switched our Rockchip images over to lima/panfrost as part of the bump to mainline kernels (no more Linux 4.4 bsp kernel). Allwinner still needs some work before it can make the same switch, but hopefully it will happen in the near future too.

For Amlogic HEVC support is being worked upon, but it's not simple. The original firmware(s) have issues, and there are differences in the software implmentation between GX, G12 and SM1 platforms which complicates everything. I've currently dropped the HEVC driver from my working branch so that content is forced through a software-decode path which at least avoids the hard crashing from missing firmware. FFmpeg still needs rework to accomodate other ecent vdec changes (H264/VP9) but I'm hoping it will be looked at in January to be combined with a Linux 5.5 bump.

VIM3L is already supported in my working tree so other SM1 (S905X3) devices should be reasonably simple to add support for.

pastebin the logs .. or we're guessing

Manually copy the RPi4 .tar update file to /storage/.update on the RPi2 and "touch /storage/.udpate/.nocompat" and reboot. The OS will update to the RPi4 image and might boot, although some things will be non-functional. Now power off and swap the SD card to the RPi4.

Put Kodi in debug log mode and watch the logs when you scan .. and you'll see the errors when it reaches those tracks. It's probably something in the scraper, but you'll need to look at the logs to see what.

If you never submit your tree it will definitely never be included.. but the challenge with LE is that we've effectively dropped the Rockchip 4.4 kernel as mainline is now a viable target (and where we need to be for all the video/audio work to evolve). Have you done much investigation on what's needed to bump your tree to mainline?

/storage/.kodi/userdata/advancedsettings.xml .. create it if required, it doesn't exist (as it's not needed) by default.

IIRC the directory is /storage/.kodi/userdata/Fonts .. with capital F

Amlogic (and Allwinner/Rockchip) development is focussed on Kodi master branch not the relase K18 branch and overall development on GBM/V4L2 moved beyond the point where it's sensible to backport patches so K18 images are no longer being created and we move forwards. The Python3 add-on situation will improve once the first K19 alpha ships and a greater volume of users demands working add-ons from their creators.

LE aims to be appliance-like and the entire OS is packaged into two read-only files (KERNEL/SYSTEM) which decompress into a virtual filesystem on boot. The OS is "locked down" because you cannot write to a filesystem that's contained in a read-only file. This is also the key to our resilience to user mistakes and simplicity of updates so it's not going to change. You're welcome to work within the constraints of our packaging .. or use a more general purpose distro (Ubuntu, Armbian, etc.) that may be better suited to your needs.

NB: Your changes on other platforms have survived minor version updates because the upstream source files for the language add-on have not been updated. Once an update to the language add-on is pushed by Team Kodi your changes will be obliterated. The add-on is always version bumped for major version updates, which is more what Klojum was referring to.

We get lots of idiots trying to spam the forum so the initial posts for all new users are moderated.

SMB access has nothing to do with skins. It has everything to do with the Kodi SMB client defaulting to SMB2 which will not be compatible with shares that only use SMB1 (e.g. a USB disk plugged into a router that runs an ancient version of samba) .. but this is very easily fixed by setting the Kodi SMB client to min/max SMB1 in the Kodi settings GUI and then rebooting.

Kodi supports 2160p without any issues. It doesn't support HDR. They are related (HDR is only used on 2160p media) but different things. HDR support is "work in progress" and may (or may not) be in K19 as the schedule for K19 was changed to bring forwards the introduction of Python3 changes to the Kodi ecosystem.

Quote from besit

Acestream engine plugin worked perfectly with leia based system, like nightly build from 12.10.

Users of piracy plugins and tools are not welcome in this forum.

You'll need to recompile the LE image with the changes applied as a git patch to the original sources, or you use another distro that supports your hardware which has more conventional OS packaging that allows files in /usr/share to be edited.

No change.

We removed all support for the Amlogic vendor kernel used in older releases so an LE 9.2 release is not possible. Meanwhile; here's Linux 5.5-rc3 kernel and Kodi v19 (pre-alpha) running on a WeTek Hub http://ix.io/25bl and WP2 http://ix.io/25gh. Recent changes to the hardware decode driver require some rework to ffmpeg and Kodi before I can push an update to LE master branch and make nightly builds usable again. I'm also exploring what's needed for mainline u-boot to run on those devices.

You might need to allocate more GPU memory in config.txt?

You need to clone the skin files to /storage/.kodi/addons/<skin> and change the skin name (to avoid namespace clashes) and then make changes to the (now writeable) skin files. Then stop/restart Kodi and select your modified skin name.