I am back from holiday now. We are preparing for the Kodi Isengard release. I will look at things with Kodi 15.x. Isengard is now in RC2 stages so waiting on this. I believe people have reported this is OK in other distros, which suggests it is a software issue.
Sam
Welcome back Sam! I hope Vero will be the flagship device as you promised it to be.
Do you agree with the remarks fritsch made in my above quotes? And if yes, what does this mean in real world XBMC experience?
Ah - I see me linked here.
You can try out most stuff by yourself. Copy something over wireless, measure the speed - you should get something arround 2.2 to 2.5 MB/s max. Copy 1000 MB file and see.
For DVD images: Turn off HW acceleration completely in the settings and play a dvd iso. This will use all cores even on what you are running right now. Isengard will fallback to “multithreaded” decoding automatically when the hw decoder cannot be opened. Forcefully disabling it for this content will give you an idea on how Isengard will perform. Don’t forget to turn it on afterwards again.
The Vblanks is a really sad story … we also did not know that it is that worse until we found out last weekend. Btw. this is called “a feature” adaptive vsync half rate (no kidding) or something.
The quadcore cubox can play dvd isos easily, as it has double the cores and more speed resources left. Also one has to distinguish between interlaced dvds playing at 59.94 and others playing at 50hz. Both will have issues cause of the mentioned problems.
This “rant” above was not written towards sam, as we have a quite nice relationship when working ontopic - if you read it in context you probably get why I got angry in that other thread.
Never the less: There are big deficits on imx6 in general, the vero gets it into the nuts the most, cause it is the slowest out of this family.
Edit: Possible solution for the mpeg-2 dvd situation: someone needs to step up and fix the hw decoder when running into still frames - I tried that but could not get it going 
fritsch thought I was someone I was not; someone who was involved with Vero and responsible for direct support of that device. Obviously in that context, he could consider the fact that I wouldnt address specific technical details of the Vero as being evasive. When the reality is that I don’t know vblanks from interlacing, and was involved in bringing the Vero to market only in the most indirect & trivial way. I really only contributed towards the MyOSMC Settings addon.
When he saw a comment I made in a thread for a different product, he read it as far more critical and aggressive than it was. (In the comment I posited an idea about why the product was limited in supply.) To be fair, in reaction I then proceeded to fulfill that expectation by listing a bunch of FUD (none of which I personally endorse, which I did say in the comment itself) because, well, if you are going to be damned as a thief anyway, why not steal? Of course, that does nothing to calm things down ¡something I am quite famous for doing¡.
So perhaps that explains fritsch’s behaviour and the vehemence of some of his comments.
As for me? Maybe I have an overcharged sense of justice/fairness and love reading my own words.
Peter is right here. Kodi Helix had a ‘bug’ where if hardware decoding was enabled, but could not be used for playback, then ffmpeg (software decode) only worked on 1 core. It was because the current dvdplayer design only found out it could not play the video in hardware when it was too late. Isengard should allow for multi-threaded SW decode without having to manually disable hardware decoding first. This may help some other platforms too, but not all codecs can be decoded in a multithreaded manner. I don’t believe VC1 permits this in ffmpeg for example
Sam
This will work for all types of videos regardless of the format - if ffmpeg supports it - you can watch the log (in v15) you should see something like:
^^ this is 4k h264 on an ancient AMD GPU, which could not open it - also here we fallback now.
Code is here: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master/xbmc/cores/dvdplayer/DVDCodecs/Video/DVDVideoCodecFFmpeg.cpp#L162
When it fails to open vdpau, vaapi, vda, dxva, etc. … it will retry with ffmpeg’s defaults at the end. That’s all the magic Isengard will do in that regard.
OK,
We only tested with Helix, where we saw single threaded decode of VC1 on a Pi.
Sam
That should work:
See the 4 threads above.
You guys are the technical ones. For me, I just want to know what this means for me and my Vero. Because my Apple TV outperforms my Vero in usability (dvd playback and menu’s, interface) I have my Vero now disconnected because it is useless. The peer public for the Vero were the non-technical guys…
So, what can I expect from my Vero with Isengard in respect to the point fritsch made about dvd-playback, max 48 fps interface, my non-working bluetooth? I don’t use wireless but UTP.
Have you got a post about this?
Can you point me to it?
Sam
Not yet, but there were others on this forum with probs. Later this week I’ll connect the Vero and start a thread.
Cool, we’ve tested it with a keyboard and it works OK. Let us know what you’re trying to pair it with.
Sam
A Lumia 620 with Windows Phone and a Samsung Galaxy with Android. They are having trouble seeing each other and when they do and I try to pair the Vero completely froze. I will get back to you!
What’s the end result of pairing, i.e. what are you trying to do? Are you trying to stream A2DP? A2DP is not supported by OSMC at this stage
Sam
I have no idea? Just try to pair with my phone to send audio from, for example, an internet radiostation to the Vero. Isn’t that the idea of bluetooth?
Bluetooth can be used for many things besides audio, such as keyboards and mice.
At the moment OSMC doesn’t support audio over Bluetooth.
Well, that is bad news. BT was one of the main reasons for me to buy the Vero. Is it a hardware or software limitation? And if the latter, is there active progress on the implementation of A2DP?
It is a software limitation
You can get A2DP only via PulseAudio (no ALSA sink for BlueZ anymore), but this is problematic for Kodi
Sam
Concerning mpeg2 playback, there is something I don’t understand. ISO playback is absolutely choppy, as well as video_ts playback. But if I open a .vob file inside a video_ts folder, playback is nice. So technically isn’t the Vero able to play these files correctly? Is the hardware capable? How is handling of iso or video_ts that much different than playing a vob file ? Converting isos to mkv is really not the solution I am looking for but if it comes to that, at least I can use the device. If there is an image we could test, I’d be happy to provide logs, results. Maybe a standard test iso could be used so that we can all compare the same things.