The Raspberry Pi foundation have announced the release of their latest device, the Model 4 B. You can read the official announcement here.
Looks pretty beefy! How does this compare to the vero 4k+ spec wise ?
The device is quite promising but the 4K + is still our flagship device, so it’s where support and development primarily go.
The new Pi looks great, price considered. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, so there won’t be hardware video acceleration, HDR, HD audio until Kodi v19 is released which will be at the end of 2020 or in 2021. We need a V4L2 pathway for that to happen. There’s progress in Linux 5.2, but that hasn’t been released yet. The Pi 4 will stay on 4.19 for a while for the sake of stability.
Some codecs need to fall back to software decoding / are not supported in hardware (VP9 (YouTube 4K), VC-1, MPEG2). This means they are effectively limited to 1080p. The focus on 4K for HEVC makes sense however.
By 2021, I suspect things will have moved along quite a lot for both devices.
It’s a nice upgrade over the 3B +. As the device is a significant revamp, you can expect some bugs for a while.
Would the 1GB mem model be enough for proper 4k operation (when that is available) or would you recommend 2 or 4 GB?
I guess that 1GB could be enough, but 4K must use more mem than the current 1080p?
4K clips seem to play well with 320MB of memory allocated to the GPU. This was testing with MMAL and GBM. There may be more complex clips in the future.
To clarify: there is no 4K hardware acceleration presently available in OSMC, and there won’t be for some time.
Awesome news 
I haven’t migrated to 4k yet so this device will be perfect.
@sam_nazarko when you say hardware decoding is not supported is that only for 4k files?
Will 1080p x264 be hardware decoded?
Also will there be improvement to sd card speed. I believe the 3b+ shared the usb bus or something so speed was reduced.
Thanks for the great news 
There is no hardware acceleration for any content presently.
Hardware acceleration will come with Kodi v19. That’s a way off yet — the first alpha of Kodi v19 has not been released yet.
The SD performance should be roughly doubled I believe
Sam
That’s a pity about hardware decoding hopefully 1080p should not put much strain on it.
How much improved is the GPU, will this help make browsing library menu snappier?
Good news on sd card performance
The GUI is fluid enough. I recommend keeping the UI at 1080p as it seems to struggle a bit at 4K.
There is no hardware acceleration for any content presently.
This is only true for the Pi4 ?
Will you be able to swap sd card from 3B+ into pi 4?
Or do need to backup and restore?
Correct. The other models still have HW acceleration and will continue to have this.
A new installation is required.
So is there any use in it to move the current OSMC Version from the Pi3B+ to the Pi4B, with the limitations on the Software side? Or wait for OSMC with Kodi 19.
Comparison between Pis:
Sam did you run some Benchmarks?
As long as you’re happy with software decoding for now.
We just want to make it very clear that some features (like HDR, 10-bit, 4K) are going to take some time to ready.
I haven’t run any benchmarks – there will be some Phoronix ones soon.
Sam
@sam_nazarko
Can u post some network and usb3 benchmarks when u get the time mate?
Is the SD/USB/Ethernet all sharing the same bus still?
Tempting little thing at that price.
Sorry – no time for benchmarks. I’m meant to be on holiday.
I’m sure other websites will publish some detailed benchmarks.
Fair enough mate, I don’t blame you…enjoy your break.
Full set of benchmarks here:
Kodi is removing support for proprietary hardware decoding interfaces and for Linux the new method of hardware accelerated playback will be via V4L2/GBM.
What do you mean by this?
It means that support for OMXPlayer and MMAL / AMCodec etc are being removed.
With Linux, to accelerate video, you need to implement a V4L2 interface.
Sam
