I know there has been a lot of discussion about this. Maybe I’m one of the few who still has a device with an S912 chip (and I know that this one doesn’t have the best image by CoreELEC). I’ve always said to myself that if Kodi Leia with CoreELEC 9.2 and the addons no longer work (e.g. I can’t watch TV or Netflix anymore), I’ll change my box. But it still works very well. Now I’ve seen at LibrELEC that with the official LibreELEC-Vesion 11 (Kodi Nexus), the S912 Soc are now supported again.
So I would like to ask if there is hope again at CoreELEC?
Sorry to bring this all up again ;).
Greetings
Not on plan, maybe someone can make and maintain it and do a PR to CE?
Or we also accept a CE fork as partner like we do already with EmuELEC, to keep such devices active!?
@Portisch
Thanks for your answer and i understand that.
I testet the Libreelec Image yesterday and i’m not happy at all.
It runs a lot worse than the old Coreelec. I have listened to your feedback and bought the TOX3 Tv Box right now ;). The ratings from this Device with S905X4 are very good for this price-range and i hope Corelec runs smoothly.
Cheers
Sorry for the bump, but I thought it was relevant to keep the discussion here: does the same argument go for the S905? I have quite some Odroid C2’s lying around that would be very happy to run Matrix 20.1/CE21. Wouldn’t mind getting my hands a bit dirty, if there’s some chance at getting it running in any clean fashion.
That was not really my question. I am wondering whether the S905 is as horrible to maintain as the S912 mentioned above. If there’s some fundamental difference that would make the S905 easier to maintain when re-ported, then I would volunteer to try (with some guidance, if possible).
Give up, these are cheap disposable devices. The S912 still works well because it has plenty of grunt under the hood but anything else will become increasingly laggy as the newer versions of Kodi load more (redundant) functionality that stretches these old chips multitasking abilities.
I still run an old S912 version of Coreelec and it works as well as my latest N2 Nexus main box - until it stops been supported. I am happy with it languishing on Leia.
The reason why Libreelec will never revive these old and new chips is because by policy they rely on mainline support fore the chip which inevitably means they do not support hardware decoding of codecs. Its low priority for mainline developers so will NEVER catch up with the new or old iterations of the hardware features. Software decoding of modern media will never cut it in the real world.
On my S912 (X92 Box) I installed SlimBox (Android 9) and on it all new Kodi version work. Personally I use Maven’s Kodi Nexus build for Android (Kodi Omega nightlies also work), and cannot complain about it’s 4K performance. It handles all audio/video formats except DV, naturally.
I do disagree with this rationale. I would even argue that many CoreELEC and LibreELEC supporters really like to stretch all the hardware they buy. I’m still typing this on my Thinkpad X250, and my phone is still an Xperia 10 (og). In case of the Odroid, it is a bit sad that it is capable of decoding all the codecs that I require, but I still have to replace it.
I do 100% follow @Shoog’s argument though: difficult to maintain because of no upstream hardware decoders combined with a limited core team is a very good argument. For me, that’s case closed. Thanks for the comments!
@Sholander that’s good to know! I’m a bit hesitant to use Android for this, however. I have a bunch of Ansible scripts to set up the basics of CoreELEC when I (re)install a box, and that approach would be moot against Android-based Kodi…
