[Guide] S928X-J CoreELEC installation and FAQs

Compatible Devices

  • Ugoos AM8
  • Ugoos AM8 Pro
  • Tencent Aurora 5 X
  • X96 X10 Pro
  • Ugoos SK-1

Requirements

  • Download ugoos.am8.dovi.ko and rename it to dovi.ko.
  • Download either remote.conf for the Ugoos UR-01 or remote.conf for the Tencent Aurora 5 X remote.
  • USB Stick / USB SSD / microSD card (whatever USB Storage you have available)
  • Balena Etcher → balenaEtcher - Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives (this is used to flash CoreELEC image onto the USB Storage)
  • CoreELEC 21 or CoreELEC 22 amlogic-ne GENERIC image → CoreELEC-NE. Use the latest nightly. Do not use the stable version.
  • Toothpick or any other tool that you can use with the device’s reset pin hole

Preparing Installation Drive

1. Connect the USB Storage to your PC and open Balena Etcher
2. Select the CoreELEC’s image file (eg. CoreELEC-Amlogic-ne.arm-21.0-Omega_nightly_20240712-Generic.img.gz
3. Select the USB Storage that you want to use, proceed with the installation and make sure that it will complete successfully.
4. Open the COREELEC partition, navigate to “device_trees” folder
5. Copy the appropriate dtb file, e.g. s5_s928x_ugoos_am8.dtb or s5_s928x_tencent_aurora_5x.dtb, to the root of your COREELEC flash drive rename it dtb.img
6. Copy dovi.ko to the root of your COREELEC flash drive.
7. Copy remote.conf to the root of your COREELEC flash drive.
8. Safely remove the USB drive from your PC

CoreELEC Installation

1. Insert the USB drive in a USB port on your device.
2. There are two ways to reboot/boot the device into UPGRADE MODE, one it’s directly from Android, using the ADB command, and the other is by using the Recovery Button. Most users find the Reset Button easiest.
a) Recovery Button Method

  • Turn off the device and remove the DC power connector (or remove the power adapter from the wall socket)
  • Press and keep pressing the Recovery button on the bottom of the device, then Power ON the device while keep pressing the Recovery button until the CoreELEC screen appears.
  • Release the Recovery Button

b) ADB Method: Make sure ADB Debug is enabled and working and then run
adb reboot update

3. At this point, if everything went well, CoreELEC should be up and running, so just proceed with the initial setup.

FAQs
1. Which Dolby Vision profiles are supported on these devices?

These devices support Dolby Vision Profile 5, 7 MEL, 8.1, and 8.4. These devices do not and probably will never support Dolby Vision Profile 4 or 7 FEL.

Information Current as of July 20, 2024

7 Likes

How does it compare in practice with the AM6B+ for the non-FEL videos? If I already have an AM6B+, is there any reason to get AM8 as a second device to use for everything except FEL?

Not unless you have an 8K TV or watch 4K AV1 videos.

2 Likes

s5_s928x_ugoos_am8_8g.dtb doesn’t exist in device tree, only s5_s928x_ugoos_am8.dtb

There is only one DTB file covering both devices.

1 Like

Ok cool I read in the guide there was two so was a bit confused

Thanks for noticing. Fixed.

2 Likes

2 posts were split to a new topic: Ugoos AM8 installation

https://www.mediafire.com/file/vt9rzu29jusb58x/ugoos.am8.dovi.ko/file

mirror link for dovi.ko

1 Like

Thanks for the mirror!

5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Ugoos AM8 installation

Tencent Aurora 5 X truehd and dts passthrough not working no sound

The device is a samsung 990b and tcl earc mode audio device select hdmi

I’m just wondering what the reasoning is behind the advice to only use nightlies? How come they’re recommended over the stable build?

because nigthly is on-going development. adding or fixing new features or problems.

stable is then all done and running stable :grinning:

Yes I’m aware of what the difference is between a stable build and a nightly build. That wasn’t what my question was, and I’m expecting the only people who can answer it would be one of the developers.

How do you think stable happen? With some magic? Someone needs to use nightly to see for any issues which can be resolved. If no one use nightly, no one spot any issue, and then issues will not be fixed in next stable. Easy.

1 Like

A post was merged into an existing topic: Ugoos SK1 - New

Ok cool so it’s purely from a development standpoint, I was wondering if it was for compatibility purposes or from a development perspective, cheers.

S928X support is very new and therefore not in the 21.0 stable build which came out on 9 April.
21.1 stable should be the first stable to include it when it gets released (probably soon).

Also, well done for spearheading S928X CE support. Looking at the main S928X thread, in the Hardware section, this took 1 year but it shows that persistence does pay off. Thank you !!

1 Like