OpenElec will be LibreElec?

campioncino · Published in 2016-12-17 17:14:24

Edited by campioncino at 2016-12-17 17:20

Maybe it's an off-topic, but I read something about this new Fork, while I'm searching about a solution for Amazon Prime Video

LibreELEC advocates OpenELEC

In recent months there have been in the community OpenELEC some quarrels that ended with the fact that a number of developers threw in the towel and with LibreELEC have started a new project. The objectives summarizes the new LibreELECteam on its website together : You want to start a foundation in the long term, a selected project board to manage the project, there should be a fixed release cycle and a few more points. Currently there LibreELEC in version 7.0 , which basically consists of a fork of OpenELEC 6.0, with upcoming versions, LibreELEC would then withdraw from the predecessor.
...
Why use LibreELEC and not OpenELEC? The reason is that with Milhouse a known Kodi- and OpenELEC developers changed sides has that built in the past regularly test builds consisting Kodi 17 including the input stream plugin, so that the system can be easily set up. His Builds there are still, however, these are now based just on LibreELEC, so I now this Kodi distribution for the project "Amazon Video on the Raspberry Pi 'recommLibreElecend. In the end, you will hardly notice a difference since these testbuilds are still largely based on OpenELEC.

If you want here you can find the complete article.

What will be the future of our OrangePi OpenElec??
Can we take advantages following the new fork?

hajoPi · Published in 2017-1-16 21:26:22

Best OS in this forum for my opipc!

linux or android ... only trouble!!!

Dima · Published in 2016-12-17 17:45:52

I would also love to see libreelec on orangepi, i think that jernej already started a fork, but only sw decoding works or something like that.

jernej · Published in 2016-12-17 17:56:38

Well, unfortunatelly, I don't have much time left for developing OpenELEC (or LibreELEC). I became annoyed with BSP kernel. There are tons of issues with it. Setting arbitrary resolutions and audio passthrough are the most obvious ones. Because of that I started to concentrate on analyzing video and other code and helping to bring it up on mainline U-Boot and kernel. When this will be in good shape, it will be already possible to make basic OpenELEC/LibreELEC distribution, albeit without HW decoding, but that is also WIP. Actually, only real issue will be no support for stand by, but this we can easily sacrifice for superior stability, configurability and much more DVB drivers. The best thing here is that basically all work done for H3 on mainline applies to H5 too.

So if someone wants to take over developing OpenELEC for H3 with BSP kernel, be my guest. I will gladly help with advices, explanations, etc. I will concentrate on mainline U-Boot and kernel developing. When the kernel is mature enough, I will consider adding support for H3/H5 to LibreELEC.

In the mean time, if nobody wants to take over, I will probably make some fixes here and there, but don't really expect new features or big fixes like additional resolution support, audio passthrough fixes, CSC (brightness control) or vsync. I really think that BSP kernel not properly design for these features and too much of the code needs to be changed. Because of that, it makes more sense to make it work on mainline kernel.

giaur500 · Published in 2016-12-31 21:29:35

No hardware video decoding? Well, not worth then, waste of time.

jernej · Published in 2016-12-31 23:31:03

giaur500 replied at 2016-12-31 14:29
No hardware video decoding? Well, not worth then, waste of time.

Not sure if you noticed, but OpenELEC fork started the same way.

giaur500 · Published in 2017-1-1 08:10:57

Looking at current stage I doubt if we will ever get somehing usable anytime soon. Usable means the same fuctionslity as we have on bsp kernel now. Currently, no display, no ethernet. VE is not even WIP.

Dima · Published in 2017-1-1 22:50:46

What's actually the biggest difference between OpenELEC en LibreELEC? As in, are they that different that it really takes a lot of work to get it working, compared to OpenELEC sources?

jernej · Published in 2017-1-2 02:15:29

Edited by jernej at 2017-1-1 19:17

Dima replied at 2017-1-1 15:50
What's actually the biggest difference between OpenELEC en LibreELEC? As in, are they that different ...

There is not much of a difference between OE and LE at this point. However, LE has newer Kodi, which requires new code to support H3.

You can easily port all changes from OE to LE. But because I implemented H3 support into Kodi 16 on my own, you must of course update code for Kodi 17. You can go quick and dirty way with just slightly updating my patches, but this has known issues and limitations. At some point I considered complete and proper rewrite with additional help, but noone with programming experiences offered any help.

jernej · Published in 2017-1-2 02:27:36

giaur500 replied at 2017-1-1 01:10
Looking at current stage I doubt if we will ever get somehing usable anytime soon. Usable means the ...

Display and ethernet are WIP and in useful state if you use them as is. Of course, both will need some improvements, but they can both be used now with out of tree patches. VE is actually WIP, at least for A10. I think that it can be extended to H3 without significant rework. Unfortunatelly, AFAIK, work on it is halted. There is always another way, although bad. Old BSP driver can be ported to new kernel...

giaur500 · Published in 2017-1-3 03:38:00

Maybe the best choice colud be to port and use bsp driver until open source version will be ready