[Testing] Kodi 18.0 Leia beta versions now available for RetroPie!

Rascas

@psyke83 said in [Testing] Kodi 18.0 Leia beta versions now available for RetroPie!:

@Rascas,

I'm interested in making the Mesa driver viable for regular use on RPI3, and Kodi is a major missing piece of the puzzle. Your latest package (2:18.4-3~buster) appears to implement support for RPI4 through a separate v8binary that's detected via the CPU revision, but this will prevent an RPI3 that's running the open driver from working.

Would you consider adding an exception to your CPU check so that an RPI3 using the firmware KMS overlay will use the v8 binary, whenever you publish the next update? Here's the change that would be needed: https://gist.github.com/psyke83/31f233144ea8fa21ecf3d9bae816b2e6

The is_fkms function is the same as what raspi-configuses (RetroPie-Setup's is a bit different).

Apologies for contacting you here, but I wasn't sure of the best place to submit a patch for the packages, and the recent branches of https://github.com/PIPplware/xbmc don't seem to have a launcher script that resembles what is contained in the packages. Thanks, and great work!

Well, that won't work, it is not easy as it seems.
The armv6 (for RPi 0/1) and armv7 binaries (for RPi 2/3) are compiled in the old style , using a specific window rendering system for the Raspberry Pi which uses, and is compiled against the proprietary Broadcom video drivers, also know as "Legacy driver". This is what everybody that I know does on the Raspberry Pi for the Pi versions up to version 3, including LibreELEC.
The armv8 (for the RPi 4) is compiled using GBM + MMAL, which uses and is compiled against the open-source video driver, also known as "OpenGL driver".

So for that, besides the 3 different binaries already available, I would need to compile another one, that would be something like done on the Pi4, which is GBM + MMAL against against open-source drivers. And besides the extra work, that is something that I don't know anyone that already attempted that, probably it would need extra patches, the h265/HEVC hardware acceleration done through NEON code would be lost, etc, etc.

In the future, for what I read in some places, the intention of the RPi Foundation engineers/devs is to make every versions of the Rpi using the open-source video drivers. They are appointing that for Kodi 19 already, but that may take some time. Then all RPi versions will use GBM + v4l2 for the hardware acceleration.

psyke83

@Rascas,

I'm aware of the difference between the legacy and Mesa driver; I've been testing all of my submissions to the fkms_rpi4 branch against both RPI4 and RPI3 with firmware kms enabled, as well as sending minor fixes to upstream projects such as SDL2, related to KMS support.

I understand that the RPI3 and RPI4 are not at feature parity regarding accelerated h265/hevc decoding support, but I can assure you that your current kodi-rbpi_v8 binary runs absolutely fine on RPI3 with the fkms overlay enabled, and accelerated h264 decoding works via MMAL, just as with the legacy driver. It's just the launcher script that is preventing it from working as-is.

Rascas

@psyke83 said in [Testing] Kodi 18.0 Leia beta versions now available for RetroPie!:

@Rascas,

I'm aware of the difference between the legacy and Mesa driver; I've been testing all of my submissions to the fkms_rpi4 branch against both RPI4 and RPI3 with firmware kms enabled, as well as sending minor fixes to upstream projects such as SDL2, related to KMS support.

I understand that the RPI3 and RPI4 are not at feature parity regarding accelerated h265/hevc decoding support, but I can assure you that your current kodi-rbpi_v8 binary runs absolutely fine on RPI3 with the fkms overlay enabled, and accelerated h264 decoding works via MMAL, just as with the legacy driver. It's just the launcher script that is preventing it from working as-is.

Nice find, I wasn't expecting that it would work on earlier RPi versions as is, great! I will test it tomorrow, I became curious on what the performance will be. And if it works fine for you, sure, I will add it to the next version, no problem ;)

psyke83

@Rascas said in [Testing] Kodi 18.0 Leia beta versions now available for RetroPie!:

@psyke83 said in [Testing] Kodi 18.0 Leia beta versions now available for RetroPie!:

@Rascas,

I'm aware of the difference between the legacy and Mesa driver; I've been testing all of my submissions to the fkms_rpi4 branch against both RPI4 and RPI3 with firmware kms enabled, as well as sending minor fixes to upstream projects such as SDL2, related to KMS support.

I understand that the RPI3 and RPI4 are not at feature parity regarding accelerated h265/hevc decoding support, but I can assure you that your current kodi-rbpi_v8 binary runs absolutely fine on RPI3 with the fkms overlay enabled, and accelerated h264 decoding works via MMAL, just as with the legacy driver. It's just the launcher script that is preventing it from working as-is.

Nice find, I wasn't expecting that it would work on earlier RPi versions, great! I will test it tomorrow, I became curious on what the performance will be. And if it works fine for you, sure, I will add it to the next version, no problem ;)

That would be much appreciated, thanks! The only small issue I noticed with this build so far is that GUI elements are tearing - i.e. vsync is not enabled - but this is happens on my Pi 4 B as well, so it's not a RPI3-specific issue, and doesn't seem to affect video playback for either Pi version, fortunately.

Off-topic: aside from Kodi, the Mesa driver is performing very well on RPI3 - much better than when I last tested a year or so ago. I'd say it's definitely a viable alternative to the legacy driver, although there are still some outstanding issues that need addressing. We're not planning to switch RetroPie builds for RPI3 to the open driver by default, but, once the fkms_rpi4 branch is merged into master, it'll be possible for RPI3 users to build packages against Mesa/KMS if they wish to do so. I'm updating as many scriptmodules as possible to support KMS, targeting RPI3, RPI4 and even generic x86 KMS (using my laptop's Intel i965 driver for testing). Having Kodi work on RPI3 for both the legacy and Mesa driver would be a great step towards the goal of having robust RPI3 support.

Rascas

@psyke83 said in [Testing] Kodi 18.0 Leia beta versions now available for RetroPie!:

@Rascas said in [Testing] Kodi 18.0 Leia beta versions now available for RetroPie!:

@psyke83 said in [Testing] Kodi 18.0 Leia beta versions now available for RetroPie!:

@Rascas,

I'm aware of the difference between the legacy and Mesa driver; I've been testing all of my submissions to the fkms_rpi4 branch against both RPI4 and RPI3 with firmware kms enabled, as well as sending minor fixes to upstream projects such as SDL2, related to KMS support.

I understand that the RPI3 and RPI4 are not at feature parity regarding accelerated h265/hevc decoding support, but I can assure you that your current kodi-rbpi_v8 binary runs absolutely fine on RPI3 with the fkms overlay enabled, and accelerated h264 decoding works via MMAL, just as with the legacy driver. It's just the launcher script that is preventing it from working as-is.

Nice find, I wasn't expecting that it would work on earlier RPi versions, great! I will test it tomorrow, I became curious on what the performance will be. And if it works fine for you, sure, I will add it to the next version, no problem ;)

That would be much appreciated, thanks! The only small issue I noticed with this build so far is that GUI elements are tearing - i.e. vsync is not enabled - but this is happens on my Pi 4 B as well, so it's not a RPI3-specific issue, and doesn't seem to affect video playback for either Pi version, fortunately.

Off-topic: aside from Kodi, the Mesa driver is performing very well on RPI3 - much better than when I last tested a year or so ago. I'd say it's definitely a viable alternative to the legacy driver, although there are still some outstanding issues that need addressing. We're not planning to switch RetroPie builds for RPI3 to the open driver by default, but, once the fkms_rpi4 branch is merged into master, it'll be possible for RPI3 users to build packages against Mesa/KMS if they wish to do so. I'm updating as many scriptmodules as possible to support KMS, targeting RPI3, RPI4 and even generic x86 KMS (using my laptop's Intel i965 driver for testing). Having Kodi work on RPI3 for both the legacy and Mesa driver would be a great step towards the goal of having robust RPI3 support.

Yes, in Kodi GBM there is tearing in the interface, unfortunnately it is a known issue, I believe VSync is not supported yet in GBM for the RPi at least. The same happens on LibreELEC also. In case you don't know, when playing a video, you can press CTRL + SHIFT + O and it will show you some stats about the playback.

The following won't stop the tearing in the interface, but for the best video experience I recommend that you enable "Sync playback to display" and "Adjust display refresh rate". Although this works best for most setups, if you are using an old TV/monitor and or an AV receiver, it may cause some issues. But for this kind of problems, the best bet is to ask in Kodi forum as they know better than me.

About the rest, that is great seeing that RetroPie devoloping is going forward, I didn't had the time to test emulators on the RPi 4 yet, but it is on my schedule, maybe I can contribute a little for that in the near future ;)

Rascas

@psyke83 Ok, I just updated Kodi packages, it should work as you wanted.

psyke83

@Rascas said in [Testing] Kodi 18.0 Leia beta versions now available for RetroPie!:

@psyke83 Ok, I just updated Kodi packages, it should work as you wanted.

Thank you very much! I can confirm that it's working fine on my RPI3 with the fkms overlay enabled. I've sent a PR to the development branch to unblock installation of Kodi for fkms targets (which includes RPI4). https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/pull/2851

thom_retropie

This seems the best thread to ask this in, apologies if I'm in the wrong place.

I had installed kodi on retropie about two weeks back. Works well enough, though, it was only on version 18.2, while 18.4 has been released a few weeks back.

Is there anything I can do to get kodi 18.4 on retropie, or do I just need to be (more) patient?
(I am basically asking, because Netflix won't work for me, and I'm hoping it would start working with 18.4)

mitu

@thom_retropie Please add more info about your system, as requested in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

thom_retropie

Apologies. Despite the notification (which I saw) it didn't feel relevant to the question.

1: I read the rules. All good.
2: Can't find anything in the docs regarding kodi 18.4
3: I searched the forum, which is how I came to this thread :)
4: I'm using a raspberry 3B with a solid powersupply, no problems from that direction
5: I used the official image from retropie.org.uk, retropie-4.5.1-rpi2_rpi3.img

Should I maybe rather open a new thread for my question regarding kodi 18.4?

Rascas

@thom_retropie The minimum requeriments for Netflix addon is Kodi 18, so it works on Kodi 18.2. The original addon from asciidisco https://github.com/asciidisco/plugin.video.netflix is deprecated and it won't work but the new one from CastagnaIT https://github.com/CastagnaIT/plugin.video.netflix/ works.

thom_retropie

Sorry, I really didn't want to pull this thread into a Netflix-centered direction. That's something I'll have to work out (it works fine if I install osmc or libreelec on my RPi). I'm really just curious how to get Kodi 18.4 under retropie for now :)

Rascas

@thom_retropie There is no Kodi 18.4 on Raspbian Stretch, only on Buster, but I can confirm that Netflix works fine in Kodi 18.2 on RetroPie, just follow the instructions. Don't forget to install pycryptodomex.