Was just stumbling over OSMC still releasing new images for those olden (golden 
older RPI. Whereas Vero 4k is retired. I guess OSMC can support those RPI almost for free because there is no change in Kodi over what Team Kodi provides, and the OS also ? Any idea how long this will go on ? Aka: beyond death of bullseye ?
For the Vero 4K: is the repo of debian packages the same as for those RPI (32 bit), so that one will still get bullseye updates until predicted death in 2026 ? Or is it frozen ?
Will probably still move my now free Vero 4k to replace my RPI2, i had those frozen on 2020 OSMC due to Kodi 18 3D support on RPI . Trickle through effects of the new Vero V
Hi
Sorry for the long winded answer.
The Pi 2/3 kept going for a while because most Kodi work comes from Raspberry Pi directly. It’s not all upstreamed, but there are well maintained downstream branches from RPi.
Because the V4L2/M2M spec was stable for Pi and I didn’t change the kernel and firmware for a long time, we could keep bumping Kodi versions for quite a while. With that said, I do plan to discontinue support for Pi 2 and 3 in the near future and just start supporting PI 4 / 5. The reason is that Pi 2/3 are not really good media players anymore.
You note that you kept them on a 2020 version due to Kodi v18 supporting 3D on Pi. It did so because it used the old OpenMAX and MMAL video stacks. After the release of Pi 4, Raspberry Pi moved to the V4L2/M2M stack with GBM as a graphics backend. It made sense at the time, but did mean that older devices weren’t as useful anymore. In particular: Raspberry Pi 3 could support HEVC at fairly good bit rates and resolutions despite not having a dedicated HEVC decoder. This was achieved by (ab)using the QPUs that the VideoCore IV had.
Unfortunately this was no longer a usable method with the new video stack, so Raspberry Pi 3 saw quite a downgrade in video playback capability as a result.
The underlying OS is the same (OSMC repository) but obviously there are different packages used on each platform to enable hardware specific features, i.e. video playback. Kodi packages and kernel also differ.
The Raspberry Pi 2 / 3 models are getting a bit old for video playback. If you have an H264 library, I wouldn’t worry. But keep in mind that if you have VC-1 and MPEG2 content, you’ll actually be better off with Kodi v18 as hardware acceleration was deprecated for these formats. Likewise, Pi 5 does not have an H264 decoder anymore, but the logic is that it has enough CPU grunt to decode them in software (albeit get a bit toasty) and save some licensing fees on hardware acceleration.
I hope that this clears things up
Cheers
Sam
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