We'd like to wish all of our users a Happy Easter. We hope that our users make the most of this time off and stay safe during this difficult period.
Reading your post about Kodi 19, would I be correct in assuming that I would be best just sticking with Kodi 18 on my Raspberry Pi 3? It seems that with the hardware acceleration unavailable on RPi in Kodi 19, it would result in a much worse setup on my hardware. Is that correct, or am I just overthinking it?
It looks like we’re in that ever-frustrating stage again that seems to always accompany a version transition, where hardware support gets buggered in the newest version, yet some of the good add-on authors are jumping to support the newest version and leaving behind the old, stable version, while others do the opposite, which ends up in neither version being much good for a while. I really wish the Kodi devs could find a better way to do this. It seriously screws over their end users in my opinion.
There will be some hardware acceleration – but there are a lot of changes for Raspberry Pi users. If your system is working, then you may want to hold off on upgrading until Pi support matures further.
You can take a backup of your system, try Kodi v19 and if not happy, downgrade easily enough. We will keep older images on our website for the forseeable future.
This isn’t a Kodi issue. The whole point of this new approach (supporting V4L2/GBM) is to define a standard that will allow newer devices to be brought up more quickly in the future. The Pi 4 is a very new device which wouldn’t support the MMAL/GLES stack in the same way as before, so the Pi team have made the technical decision to move all support to this new stack from a multimedia perspective, and it does make sense in the long term.
It will all work eventually, but it might take a couple of years to get feature parity.
This doesn’t apply for Vero users – v19 will actually bring a number of new features and improvements as our new video stack is ready for release.