I’ve been reading in this forum for a while, but registered today to ask a certain question.
In several other forums one can often read about the mess Kodi/CE/LE/… developers have to deal with regarding little to no cooperation / support from SoC vendors like Amlogic & Co in terms of GPU, drivers etc., which affects the availability, functionality, stability of the said software for certain deviecs. Since Adroid is their target system / market, Amlogic & Co seem not to care much about open source projects that allow to use their devices as a dedicated Linux media player.
I would like to know, how the situation is at Vero / OSMC? From my understanding it is (should be) a bit different here, because the software and the hardware (device, not the SoC) comes out of one hand, so to speak, unlike all the other “TV boxes”. There is also no Android, but just OSMC to use the Vero 4k+ as a dedicated Linux media player.
Do the developers here face the same issues as all others, or is there a kind of agreement with Amlogic, that allows the developers to access / use everything they need for proper development in termas of GPU, drivers etc.?
Or am completely wrong and the Vero 4k+ is built by a third party manufacturer, who might might not have any agreements with Amlogic, and OSMC is just a project like Kodi, SE, LE, … with the same issues in developing?
OSMC maintains a close relationship with the SoC vendors of supported devices: AMLogic, Broadcom (Raspberry Pi) and ensures that OSS principles are upheld and respected.
I understand. I didn’t want to ask for details, just wanted to know in general, if you are better off and it sounds as if you are.
One more general question: is OSMC more like LibreELEC or more like CoreELEC (approach wise).
I’m not an expert in these things, but from what I’ve read, CE use older kernel with many vendor specific (especially Amlogic) “hacks” / modifications to make it work with as many devices as possible, which means CE is stuck with the “old” stuff.
LE like Kodi have / use a more up to date basis withouth (m)any vendor specific stuff, which means these projects are more future proof etc.
I’m not sure how you’ve arrived at that conclusion. So far we have been able to support Vero 4K / 4K+ for over five years with stable updates and we will extend our support EOL further than originally promised.
CE only supports AMLogic devices and chooses to use an AMLogic vendor kernel.
Both OSMC and LE for Raspberry Pi use a Raspberry Pi vendor kernel as well.
From an AMLogic perspective, our next kernel will be 5.4 based, which has an LTS EOL date of 2025. By then, upstream support will be in a very different shape.
Not sure how you can write “LE like Kodi” LE is a Distribution that uses Kodi as a mediacenter so saying “LE like Kodi” doesn’t make any sense.
Fundamentally the main difference between OSMC and LibreELEC is that LE provides a Distribution that focus just on the Mediacenter (Kodi) and is not giving you the option to freely install other Linux (Debian) packages as OSMC does.