Kodi Matrix and AMLogic

In what sense? There are moderators / team members on the forum who have strong opinions but the policy is ‘Do what you want with kodi, don’t bring piracy to the forum.’
If Team Kodi wanted to police what people do they could easily restrict what can be installed. Of course that would lead tomore forks.

Edit: XBMC Foundation.

Aren’t they doing that already, forking Kodi because they don’t want to sully their good reputation? CE devs have already said they will fork off Kodi when they drop AMLogic support.

No, that’s a completely different issue. All the same rooting out of platform-specific code happened with android between jarvis and krypton. It’s not about piracy.

The whole piracy issue may have encouraged/accellerated their move to mainline, but I think they have legitimate reasons to go down that path and they can’t be faulted for that. What annoys me is that they deliberately ditched AML to early and told developers who said they were willing to do the work to sod off. That to me was unacceptable politics at play.

The other thing I hate is none of the ARM based chips are capable of mainline so why be selective about which ones you find acceptable ?

Shoog

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Having watched the AMlogic, Rockchip, Allwinner developments since the says of the RK3066 sticks, it’s clear that none of the manufacturers has taken great steps to assist developers in expanding the base of their products.

These boxes and boards are only around today because of the work of people having to essentially go it alone to keep them active.

AMLocic and others know that whilst this continues, they can stay sat in their corporate seats counting the money.

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This is the problem with the relationship between Teams LE/Kodi, if you don’t bend the knee, kiss ass and get with the status quo then you are basically not welcome.

This is actually why some of us left the LE camp, some people in Team Kodi was dictating terms to LE and if you don’t do what they want you to do then you/your fork/clone/whatever is banned on Kodi forums and your placed on the naughty list.

A prime example of this is the situation not so long ago with Kodinerds and the Guardian add-on they created, Team Kodi threatened to black list Kodinerds if it wasn’t taken down, the add-on was perfectly legitimate with nothing untoward about it and rather than take a stand they backed down and removed it for the sake of keeping good relations.

Now you look why is discussion of OSMC not banned but CoreELEC is on the Kodi forums? We don’t allow talk of piracy or support it, we hold ourselves to the same high standards as other similar projects, so there is no legitimate reason for it as we are no different from LE/OSMC in that regard, the answer ofcourse is the politics and the LE team members who have a seat at the table, they have never gotten over the fact that we have forked and continue to pull updates from them because they still rant about it to this day.

When we started CoreELEC we always said we would not be besieged by the same problems and we have stayed true to this, no 3rd party project or company has any influence in how we operate and never will, if people want to place CoreELEC on their naughty lists for that then so be it.

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Kodi’s no longer a democracy and hasn’t been since a few that i will leave nameless joined and micromanaged their way into being in charge, and seeing as theres a few similar in LE i think that LE now more then ever has just kinda become a extension of those Kodi players.

As far as Kodi’s position on the type of support they allow or condemn its really more of matter of who you are and how connected to particular team members you are. the uneven application of rules over there have been bad for along time and have only gotten worse.

As i said before this kinda crap is about MONEY plain and simple and just because they are open source projects don’t be naive in thinking that some of them are making a living off these products and when it comes to sticking to rules and being fair with people, money is one thing for sure that affects those decissions.

I always found it kinda funny when certian people got pee’d off when OpenELEC decided to open a revenu stream via the WeTek union as LE kinda sprang up around that general time period over what was bad feelings of OE’s lack of interest in new projects. Now over the years of watching LE grow I can something similar down the road with them and will probably involve Kodi in some form.

History is always a interesting thing because things always tend to repeat as even tho the particulars may be different the pattern isnt.

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@buzzmarshall your last post was spot on, I couldn’t agree more.

On the subject of money though, this is exactly the reason we don’t accept donations from users or vendors.

We started CoreELEC with a few basic principles.

  1. Listen to the users
  2. Important development decisions are to be voted on
  3. No acceptance of donations from users or vendors (except. hardware)
  4. No 3rd parties to influence the development cycle

These are all the things that do not happen elsewhere and what is most damaging to any team or project.

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Being a hacker i couldn’t agree more with your sentiments especially when it comes to money or gifts and the destructive effects it can have on a free ware type of group.

Years ago i was part of elite group of sat hackers that was all about having fun and basically pee’n off a bunch of engineer types insisting their conditional access was unbreakable so the whole thing wasn’t in any way about money and in the end some 8bit avr code we wrote was probably being used by as many people around the world as there are people using Kodi these days and it was all fun for many years till the money speculators and dealers took what we openly provided and the whole FTA scene took off at which time a couple in the group decided to cash out and port our avr code over to some fta manufactures to embed in the turner code which started the generation of FTA’s wide open without the use of any cam. Money was what started the whole downfall and by that time there were so many dealers pushing boxes and flaunting it in the face of the providers that they finally had no choice but to make the move to stomp the industry out and in a few short years laws were changed and new ones created to the point that anyone wanting to have fun were way to fearful for legal reasons.

Anyways my point is i agree about the whole money thing and even tho back then it was a bout streaming sat signals rather then Kodi being used to enable streaming protected media. It was money and the resulting arogance of a couple of the group members that killed off all the fun and good thing we had going.

Without really talking to anyone in particular here i noticed awhile ago that things were different here but because i never really spent much time on CE never noticed any real shift but with LE which i have frequented pretty much since it rolled out that there in recent times has definately been a shift in the feeling where over there. In some ways its almost like LE is transitioning into being the poster boy for Kodi’s endorsed hardware at somepoint down the road. I know publicly Kodi’s always insisting they have no dog in the hardware race but i think behind the scenes theres something smelly under the carpet going on. just speculation on my part but time will tell.

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:scream::joy: I think I just pee’d a little, I must be getting old :sweat_smile:.

haha… just wait till ya get to be my age… :slight_smile:

Thank you very much for your interjection and so kind post.

You really do excel and are an example for all.

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The quick answer and to put you outta Sholanders misery…lol …

i would say i doubt it because i can’t see a company giving up its revenue stream kinda goes against the whole point of licensing it the manner they did in the 1st place.

Thanks buzzmarshall :smiley:

I understood that at least one of those codecs is now out of licence.

In any case, I will leave the topic as, although a lot of the posts mentioned R-Pi in this thread, I have no wish to cause anyone else to make an outburst. :wink:

Oh, I found this, which tells me the Pi4 is seriously limited (IMO)

On the Raspberry Pi 4, the hardware codecs for MPEG2 or VC1 are permanently disabled and cannot be enabled even with a licence key; on the Pi 4, thanks to its increased processing power compared to earlier models, MPEG2 and VC1 can be decoded in software via applications such as VLC. Therefore, a hardware codec licence key is not needed if you’re using a Pi 4.

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They were still collecting the license fee after the patent expired. Don’t know if that is still the case.
Still, a far better situation than some manufactures releasing their products without one of the basic audio codecs for streamed video with no option to buy it.

Shoog

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Thanks Shoog … see edit above regarding the P4 :frowning:

Wow this political rabbit hole goes really deep, I had no idea. In any case, when Kodi drops AML support that actually might be a good thing for us CoreELEC users, we’ll get a better product because of it.

The Amlogic vendor code already got dropped from Matrix.

Not to worry though because we will add it back :slight_smile:

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I would love to run FreeBSD on my Amlogic S912 based Mecool KIII Pro, but I don’t expect to be able to do so anytime soon :slightly_frowning_face:

Yeah it would have to be AMD/Intel.