Kodi Matrix and AMLogic

Kodi
1

I’m starting a new thread with a reply since it was off-topic in the thread it was located.

I think that’s a move backwards to remove support for a line of hardware. I can understand how it makes development more difficult, but is AMLogic support that much of a burden?

It makes me think there’s some kind of agenda on LE’s part. I don’t understand how LE can dictate Kodi’s direction. After all Kodi supports a much wider range of hardware and operating systems than LE does.

This seems to be a common problem with Linux and GNU anymore where a small faction can dictate the direction of the whole system. It’s something that makes me shy away from Linux/GNU for BSD.

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I think for a lot of people not that much into the development side of things there are some pieces of the conversation that are missing for them so trying to understand the future logic is confusing.

A bit of history and reality needs to be understood so as to realize the various implications looking forward but the 1st thing people need to understand about Amlogic and the others is that when most of the Android boxes were introduced they never had any Intention of supporting Linux or anything outside the “canned version of Android” they work with at any given point in time, so for anyone wanting to play with linux on a box they were TOTALLY on their own.

The short history so far has demonstrated how the public coders have stepped up and taken on finding ways of making “just enough linux” types of operating systems running Kodi actually work. Almost ALL of this type of work has been done with almost NO help from Amlogic and the others even tho over the years the idea of users putting Linux on their boxes has added a decent bump to the bottom line for all those manufactures.

As a result depending on who’s device your playing with there is no real level playing field as far as individual development leading to which is best supported to be constantly changing which is what everyone is currently seeing.

presently the HK’s seem to be the best overall supported but that could change pretty easily depending on who’s developing what and on what box and if its in the public.

The biggest issue that i see is that with most of the common SoC makers using gpus from Arm that because of the way the IP is licenced there is publicly NO real userland drivers for the devices outside the limited support provided by the Android blobs, these blobs are revision specific which has kept the level of software such as the kernels at old world long out dated revisions with no very many real solutions to get around it.

A number of years back when the S912 was 1st introduced it took a few creative minds to come up with a solution wrapping the Android blobs to be used on linux driven OS like LE and CE and a number of other spin offs. Again with NO help from companies like Amlogic. Rockchip seems to have at least moved somewhat forward and is much more open then when it started but Amlogic is still leveraging against the public coders to secure its future in anything outside Android.

Theres much more to the history but thats enough of it to kinda see where things are currently sitting.

As i see it from observing basically here and over at LE the current activities have forked with CE seemingly more interested in releases based on Current levels of software as to provide current working solutions for the devices they support while LE is more focused on trying to unify the core software to mainstream support which is going to take a UNKNOWN amount of time as mainstream support can only fully be achieved once all the missing parts are 1st created then hope to get them inserted into the mainstream support, and they are doing so without really worring about current things as much as CE does.

I mean no negativity in any of what i have said as i do my own thing and have no horse in the race but have noticed the differences in their respective goals.

As far as Kodi itself goes, its hard to say now these days as the group of people behind it changes and will continue to change, I have been building it since the old days when Frodo 1st published his sources which became XBMP and doubt any of the current group of Kodi shot callers were even involved back then as over the years there were people coming and going all the time. Kodi tho as a media player needs to evolve to keep up with the changing technologies and I suspect in Amlogic’s case part of the problem is Kodi is NOT interested in trying to support a company that basically is not interested in really providing a solution to the Linux issues.

Speculation on my part but from monitoring certain things i have come to the conclusion that there is a tighter knit currently between some key Kodi guys and LE which is probably why theres a closure in the gap between the 2 groups to the point that even tho they are separate groups and Products they see the benefit of a shared future by aligning themselves. Don’t get me wrong as i see nothing wrong with any of that in anyway but do notice that is said Products not projects because even tho they may be open source lets not be naive and fall to reckognize that for some involved these are actual products with side-chain revenue streams and thats fine with me .

To the ones i am sure will argue that Amlogic has provided help i say BS… ya ya they maybe have gave a few bux here and their to a handful of Companies to solve the issue, it to this point always failed as the money was a spit in the bucket and never enough to last the development cycle it would take to develope the missing Linux peices.

Most of the public buyers tho are not really aware of any of this and usually just base their thinking on the idea that a company would never sell something without making sure everything actually works and as such has allowed over the years Amlogic to just keep pumping out new and better SoC’s and marketing them in a manner thats routed in specs that in reality never acheive in the real world what they could if better firmware was employed. Even under Android for which they have proper blobs the gpu’s on the devices are not running what they could do and theres a huge variance in Android performance from one device to the next which is mostly the result of ‘Canned versions of Android’ that go with that particular chipset they push to the downstream manufactures which are companies like Beelink, Eny and others. Getting tailored OS’s for their exact hardware is something they would pay extra for and in a market flooded with poor qualtity clones, most won’t pay for that service or they would move their price point to high to compete. This is where companies like HK excell as they spend the money and resources to make sure they get that union of good software to their hardware.

Anyways sorry for the long rant but thats a bit of basic history that might help in understanding some of the logic in the shift of who’s doing what and why looking forward.

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That definitely provides a lot of background to what’s going on. I’m brand new to AMLogic, recently with a Le Potato board and subsequently an Odroid N2. It’s all news to me.

AMLogic may not be particularly interested in supporting Linux, but you have to remember in the early days of Linux, Intel and AMD were not particularly interested in supporting Linux either. Yet Kernel and system development forged ahead. So I think “lack of interest” on the part of the manufacturer is not a legitimate reason for Kodi to take their bat and ball and go home.

In my case I’d probably be happier in terms of support to just build an AMD or Intel mini-ITX machine to run Kodi. However the huge draw for me with AMLogic is you get a relatively powerful platform for a fraction of the cost. Pricing a mini-ITX build puts me in the realm of 600 USD and up depending on processor, storage, and memory. My N2 was about 130 USD shipped including all the goodies I wanted such as eMMC, power supply, case, etc. So there’s a huge difference in cost there, pretty hard to pass up.

I think the bank for buck value in AMLogic is certainly worth the extra headache due to AMLogic’s lack of interest. However I’m not the one doing the reverse engineering and writing code so it’s easy for me to say.

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To be honest tho regarding Kodi they really are not doing anything that a lot of other open source projects are doing which is trying to ensure their build chain is using mainline revisions of the various software packages used by Kodi when building it. Its part of building a mechansim that opens up and eases the deveelopment of better use of the existing hardware as well as looking to ease development for new devices to use it.

Up till now the Android box market has been able to avoid alot of these issues from the public not as any matter of colusion because the market is driven by end users caught up in the usual marketing bs of buying the newest and supposedly fastest with no real world proof of how any of them actually perform.

The emerging SBC scene tho is bringing light to the issues tho for a lot more of the end users as the SBC’s are not just built to run Android and Kodi as its more of a real embeded board thats capable of media streaming as well as other things. Hell, i use a Pine Rockpro64 to control a 4 color 3D Printer im prototyping.

The missing GPU support on ALL of the SoC’s using those Arm Mali’s no matter which one you use is basically in the same boat. Rockchip is being more transparent and supportfull as it at least opened up and published the bulk of their SDK’s which is a good step forward, while Amlogic has been a lot less transparent and even then seemed to only open up to a small group of people, and what they’ve published openly is basically old outdated garbage. All Winner i can’t say much about as i have never looked at any of their products.

All Kodi is basically doing is draw a line in the sand and saying that were going this way and Amlogic needs to change to the same direction if they expect Kodi to support their products so if anyones at fault its Amlogic which has basically to this point taken the position of F…Y… to the public on the topic of using anything other then Android on our SoC’s and if you joe blow from the public wants that linux support you can do it on your own. It really is that simple based on their continued public position of whats going on.

Don’t make the mistake of the recent Lima and Panfrost projects having ANYTHING to do with Amlogic being anywhere near helpful enough. I know over the years they supposedly kicked a small amount of money to BayLibree and a few others but it was never anyways near enough to be constructive.

Personally i see a couple of solutions to the issues regarding the GPU stuf…

-One being driven by migrating all the key core code to mainstream as projects like LE and Kodi want which success is based on a bunch of unknown’s right now or.

-Two settle for the best workable solutions per product(device) based on the best revisions of current software available at that point in the development cycle, which appears to me to be what projects like CE are pursuing.

Or just avoid the whole game by going with one of the more expensive devices like the various mini’s where the support is there.

6

to further my point Two from my earlier statement…

Seeing how the SoC makers are already licencing Mali blobs for the associated canned Android versions distributed with those SoC’s why couldn’t Amlogic, Rockchip and the others just poney up to the table and pay for the Missing blobs tied to one of the newer mainline kernel revisions, this would at least protect Arm and their licencing regarding the Mali’s while providing some real Linux support to the GPU cores that companies like Amlogic and the rest force onto the public by picking them over other GPU’s.

Understanding all this mess makes it easier to evalutate out of the SoC’s which one’s are somewhat helping while which one continues to basically do nothing.

Way to many people are making the who and what’s the best choice based on marketting crap and buying based on which way the scene is leaning today when they really need to educate themselves and stop supporting the ones not helping, and seeing how Rockchip and Amlogic both make their own versions of SoC’s using similar GPU’s then at this time i would say use the above knowledge to make your choice, stop basing it on some dealer and their over the top marketing bs.

7

I’d probably have done that if not looking for ways to reduce costs without giving up a lot of performance. AMLogic seems to have the best answer there. The S922X actually outperforms an entry level NUC at considerably lower cost.

As it stands right now I don’t see where anything is lacking for what I’m doing with my N2. I mean I get hardware acceleration and audio passthru with all the video content I play. The one thing I know of that does not work is LPCM passthru, but I don’t use it or need it at this point.

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I tend to think the same was as there are always trade off’s, and if the weekness’s are in areas that your not really worried about then its fine, as its all about meeting your needs.

Besides the way they pop these devices out these days the release cycles are way exceding the software development end of things so the gap between decent software support and new device release keeps getting wider so there will always be things not working no matter which device you buy, so as long as it lives up to your expectations or requirements who really cares.

Thats partly why i really don’t care if the sources are mainstream or not as i use these devices for specific reasons and as long as they serve that purpose who cares, its the projects with potential revenue streams that are worried about that kinda stuff as it effects their future and what they can or can’t support. Open Source or not products like Kodi have become products that represent jobs and livings for some as i am sure Projects like LE even have to a certain point with some as well, so its in their best interest to see things go this direction.

Being of the hacker mentality i always just worry about lets just get it working and the hell with whether the job follows the rules of mainstream which is why some of us had working systems years ago…

9

The problem of this is its ignoring some of the underlying politics. The whole War Against Amlogic kicked off with the now infamous “chinese box sellers are killing kodi” on the Kodi forum and the dominance of AML on those boxes. This gehad started there and everything else has been justification since.
The truth of this is demonstrated by the unseemly haste to release a LE version for the new Raspberry Pi 4 with its none mainline kernel. If the critique of none mainline AMLogic kernels were all there was to it then there would be no place for a new release of LE for the new none mainline RP4. This is the spotlight which identifies the lies and hypocrisy at work.

Shoog

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Has the necessity for purchasing codec licences for the R-Pi been eliminated?
Last one I bought was a Pi2 and it required codec licence purchase to watch live TV.

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Are you blind, this is not a fakingpie forum!

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Couldn’t have said it better myself @Shoog you have hit nail on the head.

The hypocrisy and double standards has been demonstrated no better than it has today, they pretend like Amlogic vendor code was being removed for some reason but actually it’s kinda fake for RPi and they swap one vendor kernel for another.

I hope everybody who purchased an Amlogic device now sees this.

At least there was some admission today from King FUD himself that mainline is not all its cracked up to be, did we not say that the removal was premature? Truth is LE/Kodi doesn’t care about Amlogic because they knew all along that RPi4 was coming.

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Ah yes, the politics. Forgot about that one. So it’s more about distancing Kodi from those “fully loaded boxes” than anything else. Makes a lot more sense now. Sometimes I forget 90% of software development is 50% politics, hehe.

As far as the RPi4, I still would not consider one, never did. Those things are weak. Nothing drives me nuts more than an embedded device that lacks power, you see it all the time with consumer electronics. I mean the RPis have their place, but for me and multimedia stuff it’s not it. The only place for me to go after the N2 is an HTPC.

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I still run a Rp2 running LE Leia as a media center on an old CRT TV - it work fine and there seems little point in ditching it until it dies. The RP4B is likely to be more than enough for most media center users so I wish it well.
However the performance edge that the N2 offers would probably make me splash the extra cash to get smoother interface performance, the one thing that the Pi is unlikely to match is GUI smoothness for no other reason than it is limited to SD storage.

Shoog

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I used a TiVo box for a long time as my media center. It was a Series 3 unit and used a Broadcom chip running Linux similar to the RPi. TiVo was Linux based at that time and as far as I know it still is. Anyway, that’s an example of an under-powered consumer device. It used to drive me nuts how the thing would stall at times processing user interaction. If I never have to see that kind of thing again my life will be better.

Obviously some things require lots of processing power and take a long time. Those kind of things I accept. However, just sorting a list of entries in a data base is inexcusable and that’s the kind of thing I saw routinely with the TiVo. There’s lots of other devices I’ve used that will crunch away on user interaction for seemingly simple tasks. When it comes to embedded systems it seems the norm is for software to ask more of the hardware than it’s capable of doing in a timely manner.

Anyway, Kodi trying to distance themselves from Chinese content pirates by dropping support for a line of hardware is at best futile and at worst ridiculous. Since when has this kind of policing actually overcome the ingenuity of Chinese pirates. The only people that pay are the legitimate users. Microsoft had to give up on the idea much as they tried, and boy did they try. Pretty much all Windows computers in China run a pirated version. In fact you would be hard pressed to find a legitimate version anywhere there.

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I’d imagine using either a fast usb stick or ssd via usb3 port would give decent results.

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Kodi’s no different then any other growing entity and thats about world foot print and for years everything was going great for them.

It really wasn’t till countries started feeling pressure from their own media service providers about their loss of potential revenue because end user started to totally buy into all of the over-the-top bs advertising being used by all the no mind box flipppers using Kodi’s with the never ending string of Plug-ins that allowed Protected media to be stream. Once that gained a foot hold Kodi came under alot of scrutiny about where responsiblity lies as far as all the pirated material being pilfered by the use of Kodi.

It was so far out of hand that software like Kodi and all the plugins usually were loaded by some wannaby dealer buying 10 oem boxes at time to all of a sudden Factories Like Eny Beelink and others started preloading Kodi and all the plugins and the war has just gone crazy moving forward.

Personal i don’t see the blame with the Chinese pirates tho being resposible for Kodi’s Piracy problems as they appear more to be just doing business trying to feed the frenzy for free protected media.

Kodi’s politics have always been more routed in inner-conflict amongst their own members and always has been which is why one would be hard pressed to find any of the original team guys involved any more. Thats always the problem when you start putting together teams of volunteers to create something because in the end it almost always ends with the strong willed taking over pushing others out of the inner circle.

Its kinda like what happened in the way back days when OpenELEC got started and then because some got their nickers in a knot over some commercialiism happening because of the tie to WeTek people started to split and low and behold LE became a reality. I think its just a human factor as some are strong willed while others are more passive but eventually something happens over time and another shift takes place. In some ways i see some of those similar signs here as well with CE going its way while LE seems to be becoming a lot more closer to some Kodi members which i think is partly to do with the line in the sand.

I spent over 15 years hacking Satellites here in NA and always said that what happened to it in the end will be the same in the Android box market and Kodi streaming Protected materials. which is for years they left us along while we had working hacks but once the free load wanna be dealers mover in because they see the potention revenu streams that it eventually forces the hands of the legitamate media providers to start with legal crap and countries start changing laws to protect their tax paying corporate providers. For the last couple of years that cycle has started which is what lead to Kodi as a business entity being legally challenged about resposiblity. that was when the banned plug-in list happened and things started to change from there. I can’t speak about europe but here in Canada we have some of the highest media rates as the goverment has allowed the continual rape of Canadians by the media providers so theres a never ending line of endusers looking for cheap boxs to stream supposedly illegal content.

Anyways i only made this part of the post because the issues of Amlogic not being supported by Kodi going forward i really think has nothing to do with chinese pirates. Its a simple matter of if Amlogic wants future support in Kodi then they need to get off their ass’s and actually help out rather then sitting on the side lines waiting for others to fix their issues which is to be honest Kodi’s perogative to stop supporting if the so wish.

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None of this really matters to me, but I hate the posturing and dishonesty. I will use whatever works for me and if some big ego decides to stop what I need working for me - f@#k them and goodbye.

Shoog

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The Motion Picture Industry and to a lesser extent Television have always been rabid about protecting their copyrights. Look at all the craziness in copy protection from DVDs to Blu-Rays to UHD disks. The latest for UHD is just over the top with a requirement for the player to download an encryption key the first time a disk is played. Where has it gotten them, have they actually thwarted any piracy. In the meantime they’ve made things more difficult for the legitimate user.

That being the case I’m actually surprised the industry’s lawyers don’t just slap an injunction on the XBMP foundation’s ass. It’s not like any of these open source projects are in a position to protect themselves legally. Pretty easy to shut them down actually. Of course they can always just move their servers out of jurisdiction.

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Just no. They’d need some grounds for an injunction - and given kodi’s piracy policy they’d struggle to find them.

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So then why does Kodi think they need to police what people do with their product. I mean they plainly state their policy on piracy, enough said, they’re done.

BTW, being right or wrong has nothing to do with corporate law. Chances are with the good 'ol boy network, they could find a way to place an injunction on XBMP foundation if they really wanted. They just don’t really want to. Don’t mistakenly think there’s any real sense of right and wrong in the US justice system. In corporate law it’s more about who has the best lawyers, even that way in civil and criminal law to an extent as well.