Media streaming on PI Plus

pawlu

I am terribly disappointed with the performance of Kodi on my Orange pi plus.
Waht a waste of money !
I used to go to settings andtry, without success to change the video resolution, but its futile.
Now, it is even worse, because the resolution settings just disappeared for no aqpparent reason. Its is just showing PAL or NTSC settings !!!!!!

Its not TRUE HD, and the audio is far from todays standards.
Movies look more like 35mm celloloid film, with optical track than 720 or 1080 ! !

And the proof is here :
I have downloaded the OSMC (OSMC is a dedicated Kodi software OS) from https://osmc.tv/download/
and it does not install because of video restrictions. The restriction is that the orange pi has NO  genuine HD components.

bronco

You should differentiate between hardware and software.

All the Orange Pis are able to do depends on the SoC (their heart). The H3 as used on the newer models is meant for Android OTT boxes (Android 4.4. only) and combines 4 slow cpu cores (Cortex-A7 @ 1.2GHz) with a slow and old Mali400MP2 GPU. What you can expect from such a low-end Android TV box setup you can read in several reviews, eg. http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/08/04/zidoo-x1-review/ (have a look at the category link H to read other reviews for H3 devices and look also in the comments for other reviews and some more important insights)

Given you find a working Android image for your OPi plus you can get the same experience with your device. Maybe the manufacturer supplies Android images for the various H3 OPis (don't know), maybe they even work (would doubt that, the only working images are based on community work and are provided by loboris -- with some knowledge you might be able to transplant kernel/script.bin from there to a non-functional Android image, of course)

The mistake you seem to make is using Linux as a media player. There HW acceleration doesn't work therefore video decoding has to be done by the slow CPU cores which simply doesn't work with high resolutions and modern codecs. What to do? You could ask Xunlong (that's the same as Steven Zhao) and they/he will tell you "we're working on video acceleration, will release in a few weeks|months|insert-whatever-here, just give us some time" (that's the answer you get every few weeks from him regardless what's the matter). If you ask the people who do the real work you get a more realistic answer: https://github.com/linux-sunxi/libvdpau-sunxi/issues/39

jernej

I'm currently working on OpenELEC port for Orange Pi 2, you can check OpenELEC subforum here. Good news is that it is almost working. There are sound issues and video is SW decoded. When I managed to get sound working (currently most important issue, any help appreciated), there seems to be an easy way to get HW acceleration working in kodi. Zhao Steven provided me with CedarX Linux binaries and Zidoo opensourced their kodi source code.

bronco

jernej replied at 2015-11-26 03:29
Zhao Steven provided me with CedarX Linux binaries and Zidoo opensourced their kodi source code.

Interesting, isn't Kodi already open source? So Zidoo releases the source code of an open source project (and the only news is that they include a closed source binary) and Steven provides you with another set of closed source binaries (every Android image contains?) Have you read that: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=221855 ?

jernej

I meant that Zidoo set up a github repository with modifications they made to Kodi. That binary you referenced is actually render lib and has nothing to do with CedarX. The most valuable code in this manner is hidden here: https://github.com/zidootech/zid ... s/Video/AWCodec.cpp

AFAIK, people on kodi forum didn't say that it can't be done. They are just saying that they don't want to do anything in that direction until Allwinner fully respects open source licenses. Actually, they say that now it might be corretly open sourced, they just are not interested in it anymore (http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread. ... =2060163#pid2060163).

I quickly compare open sourced version with closed binaries and functionality wise, open source version with closed source plugin seems to be equally capable (with some minor bad code, e.g. plugin search code). However, I won't be sure until I try it. But before that, I want to sort out sound issues.

At the end, why wouldn't we have working kodi on H3 if there is a possibility? I will try to switch to open source version after I get closed source version working.

EDIT: About your remark for getting libs out of android:
Did you ever try to run android binary on linux or other way around? If you would, you would know that this is usually impossible, at least without compatibility layer which sometimes doesn't work very well. Issues are two. Android doesn't use standard libc. It uses BIONIC version, which is not binary compatible. Second issue is that Android on ARM platform usually uses soft float point approach in binaries. If you want speed and in multimedia enviroment you certainly do, you go with hard float point approach in binaries. These two are equally binary incompatible.

EDIT2: Zidoo github code

jacer

If you are using Android, you can use MXplayer or try this ROM below with the preinstalled Kodi.
http://www.orangepi.org/orangepibbsen/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=755&extra=page%3D1