Hello!
I know its work in progress but maybe there are some updates possible on the current status? I wonder whether this unusual delay is due to the Rasperian Foundation or specific to osmc? (Although I did not find another distribtion with better Video performance on the Pi4)
Its getting frustrating having a device in the corner now for months but useless as a media player…
Thanks, Haegar
I don’t have any news at this time. As the device is new and MMAL is being deprecated from Kodi, we need to support V4L2/GBM. This is still a work in progress by Raspberry Pi
In the interim we will support software decoding. It will be a long time (at least a year) before hardware video acceleration is working well using this stack.
Any external contributions in the form of testing and development in the community would also be appreciated.
Sam
Happy to help with Pi4 testing too.
Thanks Sam for the update.
I dont quiet get the difference between soft- and hardware decoding? What precisely would need another year?
And it is still far from obvious why the implementation of a decoder (whether hard- or software) would need such a long time. I dont remember any similar mismatch between hard- and software in 30-40 years IT history… what is so special for the “new” chips on the Raspberry board? No documentation? Unknown (or wrong) specs from the chip developer? A clash between the Kodi and Raspberry developer communities?
I would be happy to test beta releases and provide feedback.
Thanks, Haegar
My limited understanding is that certain features which would enable hardware decoding won’t be available until kodi 19 is released, which is likely to be a year away.
The Raspberry Pi uses a completely new GPU. Kodi is moving towards V4L2/GBM for a video hardware stack, and support for HDR etc has only begun in Linux 5.3. To put it simply, there is a lot of work that needs to be done.
For feature parity with older models of Pi, it will definitely take a couple of years, which is why software decoding is the better option in the interim.
Thanks for the explanation. So I guess a software solution (as used in LibreELEC) would give us at least the features and performances of an older Pi2 or 3? So 1080p video, H264, H265(?) and maybe basic 4K support?
I guess many OSMC users would be happy with such an interim solution. The “beauty” of OSMC would be than I can use my Pi4 for Kodi but still use some other useful software as the OS is not closed.
Cheers, Haegar
LibreELEC are using MMAL and GBM, which is a bit of a bodge. There’s not much point in doing so from an OSMC perspective as MMAL is likely to be deprecated in the next version of Kodi. Support for other video pathways such as AMCodec has already been removed.
On LibreELEC you can play 4K video with hardware acceleration, however:
This doesn’t make it very useful presently for playing back 4K UHD rips or commercially produced content.
The efforts to support these features are being made on the V4L2/GBM stack, rather than the MMAL stack.
You won’t get 4K support with software acceleration. I covered the limitations and what to expect from Pi 4 when the device launched in June.
Sam
Ok, understood. The point is right now I cannot play any videos, not even SD as there is no Pi4 image available. I dont know about other users but I would be happy to wait for the whole 4K stuff if I could get at least the features as with my old Pi2…?
That’s what I am working on.
You will need to be patient however. I’m the only one working on this and there are many other things that I need to work on as well.
Hello, when is the support for RPi4 finished?
Is there a release date?
Thx Cosmicbase
Hello and welcome to the forum. I moved your post to an existing topic that should provide the information you are looking for.
I have a Pi4 4GB available that I have been running Libreelec 9.1.501 and 9.1.502 on (my main system is still a Pi3b running OSMC)
I’d be happy to test for you…
There’s a good guide on the Raspberry Pi forum to install Kodi on Raspbian. Working great on my RPi4 2gig.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=251645
Doesn’t play nice with 1080i content (DVB-T) which is a real shame for me.
The tearing that LibreElec suffers from when navigating the menus is also there.
Apart from that it’s ok.
I’m not sure what you mean. I always limit the resolution on my menus anyway.
Just what I posted, slight screen tearing when navigating menus.
Do you have the refresh rate set correctly? I’m not seeing this with either my RPi3B+ or RPi4.