im on homatics box r 4k plus with omega-ng 21.1.1 latest nightly also experienced the white artifact problem on some 1080p movie eg Adele live at royal albert.
Amlogic-ng is not compatible with SC2 h264.
Use Amlogic-ne!
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Is there any way to totally disable the hardware de-interlace function in S905X4 devices ?
I mean keep the hardware decoding but send the interlaced content as is to the TV?
On CE-NG it gives horrible white artifacts and on CE-NE it’s not that good. Most modern TVs are way better at de-interlacing themselves.
Facing exactly the same issue on Dune HD Pro Vision 4k running CoreELEC-Amlogic-ng.arm-21.1.1-Omega_nightly_20241122-Generic. Only videos in H264, 1080i are affected. Even under Dune OS Mediacenter the videos show issues - while they do not show the artifcats, on chapter skip the video freezes while audio continues. However, exactly same video files play flawlessly on Vero4k with latest OSMC.
But all other video files with H264, 1080p play fine. Is your statement referring to 1080i only?
CE-NE does not have FEL support, does it?
It depends on the kernel version and the s905x4 SOC revision.
some speculation:
the older s905x4 rev b SOC doesn’t have this problem on kernel 4.9. Amlogic made some change to the newer s905x4 rev d, and updated their kernel 5.4 decoder code to account for the change, but didn’t backport it to kernel 4.9.
The s905x4 only very briefly ran on kernel 4.9 (Android10) before kernel 5.4 support was added (Android11). Most of the lifespan of the s905x4 has been using kernel 5.4, where it has the most support including CE-NE (kernel 5.4).
Presumably no s905x4 rev d boxes were ever released with Android 10 (kernel 4.9) for Amlogic to have needed to address this problem.
No CE-NE doesn’t support DV FEL, Amlogic dropped FEL support in kernel 5.4.
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Thanks for detailed description! So this means with the s905x4 rev d you will never get 1080i working properly while at the same time have FEL support as the former requires CE-NE while the latter CE-NG? Is this a temporary limitation or is there hope that either FEL support will be added to kernel 5.4 or rev d updates are backported to kernel 4.9?
I bought the Dune HD Pro Vision 4k mainly because of FEL support in CE but seems whenever I want to watch H264 1080i need to switch to Dune OS… pretty annoying. Are there boxes with rev b still available?
As mentioned, even in Dune HD and its Kodi (Kernel 5.4.125) there are some issues with 1080i. It does not show artifacts but on chapter skips video freezes (Dune OS Mediaplayer) and you only get it back working by a stop/play cycle or, in Kodi it shows buffering circle forever but you can skip further to next chapter or the one after then it resumes playback.
Unfortunately, a reasonable number of music concerts are in H264 1080i.
I’d hesitate to say never, but would say very unlikely that the h264 CE-NG playback problems will be fixed for the s905x4 rev d. You could spend dozens of hours looking through the 5.4 & 4.9 AML h264 code and get nowhere trying to figure out the problem. It’s not like Amlogic documents these things well for outsiders to understand.
There are only so many core CE members holding CE-NG, CE-NE, and CE-NO together that there’s no time to invest in the oldest kernel version that is on the brink of retirement.
That said, if someone from the community wanted to spend possibly many many hours trying to figure out the cause and solution, maybe it could get fixed?
The best solution right now for FEL support and h264 playback without issues is to go with one of the DV licensed s922x boxes. It was reported the the Homatic’s R Plus silver boxes may be using the s905x4 rev b, and that some of the Kinhank G1’s as well. But it’s a bit of a lottery what you get if you go with one of those.
Many thanks for your explanations, very helpful!
Any chance Amlogic will add FEL support in kernel 5.4 somewhen later?
Depends on Dolby & they’ve said no repeatedly, remember it was by chance that 4.9 kernel got fel as it was & still is for disc players only.