Unfortunately with FreeBSD and HTPC software there’s mostly crickets chirping. Not a whole lot of interest there.
That’s one thing that can be a bit frustrating, every package requires a maintainer and sometimes package maintainers can just abandon a project. Though anyone can volunteer to add one and keep it up to date. I think package maintenance is one of the areas where FreeBSD is lacking participation.
It may be possible to run all the Linux binaries under FreeBSD’s compatibility environment. That might be a way to get the latest version going and add the peripheral support software.
If you made some sort of announcement that you were thinking of assembling an Amlogic based FreeBSD HTPC and wanted to gauge interest I’m sure that would generate a lot of interest.
From my own point of view, just a basic system which supported the DVB-S2 adapter, the NIC and USB slots and could run Tvheadend would be fantastic. Everything else would be a bonus.
Does FreeBSD even support AMLogic? I know ARM is “supported” and I say that in quotes because from what I’ve read it’s not exactly tier 1, but for sure you’d be out of luck with any hardware video acceleration.
The support of AMLogic video acceleration is the “claimed” matter of contention with future Kodi support of AMLogic, though after all this discussion I’ve come to realize it’s mainly just the smokescreen they’re using for a political move. In any case it’s quite an accomplishment developers got it working even in Linux.
Personally, if I ever set out to do a FreeBSD HTPC, it will be on Intel/AMD and even that will test my system administrator kung fu.
I don’t know, I was asking honestly. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see FreeBSD running Kodi on AMLogic with all the bells and whistles. I just think it would be a very difficult thing to do without some serious talent and motivation as a developer.
CoreELEC has the luxury of standing on the shoulders of a large developer base supporting many different hardware platforms. On FreeBSD it would literally be a one man show all the way from hardware support to incorporating the latest version of Kodi and customizing the build. Then there’s peripheral software like TVHeadend. I don’t know if that’s humanly possible for a single person, and without compensation no less.
Sorry kinda got distracted with my newly arrived N2 and another thread here… anyways the short answer is that i have run across a few embedded devices with other arm engines, being things like odroid, raspberry and beagebone, so the arm part of things i am thinking should be doable with some work.
I have seen a few abandoned or dead aml related things but the Amlogic part doesn’t worry that much as i have been creating/fixing Aml and Rockchip since they appeared on the Android box market years ago and already have all the fix’s i need to run most of them on their respective kernels at a minimun level but in most of the newer cases can run them on my current 5.3 based kernel.
As we speak i am messing around with release 12 and getting it up and running on a pc… being a bit of a pain as its been so long i kinda forgot the old style of install methods and have had to restart a couple of times playing around just to get familiarized again… i am hopeing that before the day ends to have at least release 12 up and running with a gui and whatever the supported kodi version is.
Theres others then just me thinking about going down this road, i just happen to be the one that crawled outta the cave to look around awhile back.
As far as the TVheadend thing goes i am not sure if any of my buds want to take that on or not as here in North America most sat stuff is dead and FTA is limited… The dreambox with a working CA would be the appropriate thing on our side of the hemisphere as pretty much anything worthwile that we can grab for a sat downstream is pretty much locked up and not legally discussable… but depending on how close the binaries are might not be a real big issue…
thanx… ya ive come across a few different things sofar…
I joined the Freebsd forums as well so if i stop around here you should be able to find me over there as well…
I am still playing around re-learning the bsd’s but seriously think both Amlogic and Rockchip support can be done, i am just debating tho if i want to go 100%bsd or do a bsd kernel with a linux userland…
The last couple of days i had release 12 and a desktop with the pkg kodi working tho it was just old krypton but then while making some fixes to compile the newest Kodi sources the mb died… shoulda just used a better machine in the 1st place. lol… so i am just reloading software now…
Hehe, that seems to happen a lot. These experimental Unix systems always get relegated to old hardware. Well, keep posting, I’m interested in how you do with it.
bsd kernel will not work. It is an illusion. All the Amlogic work is done for linux kernel. I doubt that anyone could do it in a reasonable time frame. Baylibre is working years now and they have several full time employee’s. I hear it costs some companies six figure USD per year to pay Baylibre.
I figured that would be the case. BSD Kernel works for the most part on ARM, though not as well supported as i386/AMD64. I’d expect AMLogic to be out of reach. Seems like a battle even for Linux.
The preemptive approach by team Kodi and Team LE to removing AMLogic specific fixes from their software is entirely political and/or excessively optimistic. The rate they are going they will have restricted their software to running just on Intel chips before there is a hint of a functional version available for any ARM based hardware. They are even killing off their massive Pi base as we speak.
Wow, I guess they’re committing hardware suicide. I don’t know the numbers, but I would expect there’s a hell of a lot more ARM based Kodi installations than Intel/AMD ones.
Like I said I don’t know the numbers, but that actually surprises me. There’s a general shift away from Intel/AMD platforms these days with more people using ARM devices for everyday tasks.
any source? That surprise me. I am curious about their future. But it could be, that I will skip next Kodi version (as I did with 17) again for possible unmaturity (videoplayer changes in case 17).
Been there since Pi1 and OpenELEC it makes me kinda sad. I am glad for CoreELEC team, lets see how my Rpi2 running goes after few years
Its happening on github.
The issue for me is that without the support of ARM with Mali drivers - the open source developers will never be able to keep up with the relentless release schedule and will always be at least a year behind.
