I’ve noticed Vero2 comes with a Mali chipset, which is renowned in the Open Source world for its lot of frustrations given Allwinner’s despicable attitude towards the GPL. I also know Debian for its strict rules of conduct so when I saw Kodi fully working with effects and everything on the Mali chipset I couldn’t but think back of the day I was trying to make OpenELEC work with the Orange PI mini, for which I had to throw the towel due to the very same reasons — no one in Kodi “ecosystem” would be willing to contribute, as far as I observed and I fully understood why.
My observations may have been wrong so I’m asking how did you guys make it work… should I say flawlessly?
I think that Orange Pi products are based on AllWinner SoCs. These use a much older Mali-400 GPU instead of Mali-450. However the source and firmware for Mali devices is freely available; the issue with AllWinner devices is that the video decoding parts are not open. There is CedarX but Kodi developers don’t wish to enable AllWinner’s behaviour towards open source. There are some developers reverse engineering CedarX, but there is a long way to go.
So in short, the Vero 2 has a different GPU and a different SoC, so video playback is very different altogether.
Thanks Sam. Can I safely assume from your answer and the fact that Amlogic (the company behind the Vero2 chipset) thrives at providing open source drivers makes it so that the entire video stack is functional (obviously, yes) and open source under Linux?
I was asking the question because I’m somehow considering building a Kodi-based automotive infotainment system for my company (I’m an electronics engineer) with features I’ve yet to find in competitors’ products — the closest of which is Parrot. So I was planning to use a multicore CPU which would not impede the video experience, unlike the AllWinner A20 you find in other single-board computers such as Orange Pi.
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