I am a little confused about the current status of multidecode. 2 years ago the release notes for 9.2.2 said:
Also of importance to our -ng releases is a fix to Kodi that makes use of the Amlogic multi decoder u-code, as development by Amlogic on the single decoder u-code used in earlier releases appears to have ceased. This brings improved hardware video decoding capabilities and more content is now playable with fewer issues than ever before.
I am using 19.5-Matrix-rc1 (Amlogic-ng-arm) and apparenty this patch which deactivates multidecode is still active. Why? Did the fix to kodi cause problems?
I am running in a UBUNTU chroot vdr with its output-Plugin softhdodroid. PIP (Picture in Picture) in vdr is only working with a patched CoreElec kernel - the mentioned patch has to be removed. It was confirmed in german vdrportal forum that kodi is still working.
So my suggestion is that you check if multidecode can be re-introduced to CoreElec.
Until it doesn’t anymore. When I do fast switching of TV channels with pvr iptvsimple addon playback stop working randomly. And this patch fixes this.
Maybe I should do another round of tests to see if the patch is still needed. But from what I know Kodi didn’t made any changes in this area so I would say patch is still needed.
Kodi does not support PiP and can only handle one video stream at this time. It will require a complete restructure of Kodi to be able to handle more than one video stream in parallel. So this maybe happen never…
Amlogic hardware would be able to handle up to 9 hardware decoder in parallel.
What about the fix for kodi that was mentioned 2 years ago?
Anyway, it is not my intention to let kodi use multidecode. But if it can’t do this, it should simply not make use of it inside its code.
My suggestion is to supply a kernel without this limitation so that other applications can use it.
You may argue against it by saying that CoreElec is a kodi distribution and not made for usage with other applications
But kodi and vdr is a perfect symbiosis. With the softhdodroid-plugin vdr can finally be used like it was designed for - no longer limited by the kodi interface. Both vdr and kodi can run on the same machine with easy switching the surface.
CoreELEC is a headless Linux with only Kodi as GUI, so it would make no sense to enable more than one decoder. No, it would even make more issues as the Kernel get confused about the streams as Kodi open/close stream handling is faulty. The results are black screen because Kernel display stream two and Kodi feeds stream one.
