Would this also enable playback of full 3D MVC?
I would guess that at least initially there would be a loss of functionality with the move to mainline, so I would expect a period of many months before the Kodi experience matched that achieved with the 3.14 kernel.
Progress to a stable experience is likely to be painfully slow, and for most people sticking with the 3.14 kernel would be the best thing.
Shoog
To be honest right now I don’t care about kernel 4.X, however I do care about possibility of porting this new driver to existing kernel 3.14 so we could have hardware accelleration in CE 
I’m not sure if this would be even possible.
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Don’t we already have hardware acceleration for video?
I’m just hoping for better UI performance. Otherwise, CE is great as it is.
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3.14 will not have the V4L infrastructure for the driver and no one is going to go to the trouble of backporting it when the focus will be on getting AML mainline kernel stable. When the driver is mature it will force a migration to mainline, it is all the other subsystems (such as power management) which may need tweaking before that matches the functionality of 3.14 kernel. However a lot of that work should be already done by the people at Ubuntu Canonical.
The experience of other opensource video drivers, such as the Nouveau driver, shows that it took years for it to approach the performance of the closed source drivers from Nvidea, so moving to mainline might not be what people expect.
It is only the fact that the Kodi team is going to force everyones hand that will make the transition inevitable, many would prefer to stick to what works.
Shoog
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Does this mean that on S912 boxes like the Minix U9 we’ll be able to watch Netflix from the Netflix addon in Kodi?
No, it doesn’t.
Concretely, in the long term, what can it bring for the user?
The ability to switch to mainline kernel, and have Kodi 19 work on it.
It would also get rid of a bunch of other issues we have with the ancient 3.14 kernel.
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what the hell is needed for the S912 SoC to perform like S905 for streaming?
Thought with this driver it is solved…
Cool ! Thanks.
The VPU based acceleration with V4L is only one part of the mainline game, and the simplest one also.
We need GLES 2.0 mainline DRM, Lima project is working on it, but the status is quite far from being usable is general deployment, at least as far as I know.
Also, the Mali in the S912 is supported by Panfrost project that is even behind the Lima status
Looks like things are getting pretty neat for V4L 
Also, it seem Linux DRM is almost there: https://twitter.com/librecomputer/status/1047991238266441729
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Here’s the latest news on this topic.
- LibreELEC has done some testing with the Lima driver, and apparently very good progress has been made on the S905X SoC!
https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/5848-8-2-2-3-libreelec-8-2-for-s912/?pageNo=111 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3UPJhet2Ak - Panfrost has seen major advancement! Check out Alyssa’s blog and the talk they (Alyssa + Lyude) gave recently on the topic.
https://rosenzweig.io/blog/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtt2Y7XZS3k - Last but not least, Neil Armstrong recently posted a video of a Mail T820 running kmscube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrZT9CveJww
All-in-all, seems like there’s some light at the end of the tunnel for these SoC’s, along with linux mainline and Kodi support (fingers crossed).
And a massive thank you to all people working on this! (CoreELEC, LibreELEC, Alyssa, Lyude, Neil, Lima team, etc.)!
And a new one, fresh out of the oven!
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Hi guys. A CE and Amlogic noob here, sorry for the rookie concerns. After decades of building my own expenive HTPCs I recently bought the excellent Minix U9-H box, which outperforms anything I have had before. Performance is so good that I considered buying another one.
But, after reading some more threads and posts about this matter I was discouraged, a bit. In another thread, there were no doubt that most Amlogic platform will lose the Kodi Support from Kodi19. That would be a shame of course, eventhough I, to some extent, understand why.
It appears that this thread shed some new light on this topic? Posts from last summer makes me a bit confused what this really means, but later posts insinuates that this might not be the end of the road for for instance S912 and Kodi19 and onwards? Is this a correct conclusion from my side? If someone more with more technical knowledge can confirm this or tell me in plain english what the resent discoveries means in practice, I would be very grateful.
I do understand that the switch to a new kernel is not made quickly, and it will take time to have it in place.
quote @chewitt : S912 has a bright future. See YouTube for evidence. Panfrost still has some serious bugs to solve before we can think about public testing, but considering the infancy of panfrost code it’s in good shape. The lead panfrost developers have publicly stated good Kodi support is one of their goals !
Thanks Dan. Google Translate told me that there is hope, but we need to wait and see! Maybe a more cheap S905X box is the weapon of choice before we know more. Thanks
In the last S912 images of @balbes150, used by the kernel 4.20 with panfrost
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Great news!