2015-04-15, 05:50
I am trying to determine what Kodi should be able to do, and what it should not be able to do on my specific (2010 vintage) trusty old MSI X340 laptop.
The official specs for this laptop can be found here:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/01/msi-o...wind-u123/
The short version is that this machine contains a Intel ULV SU3500 (Core 2 Solo) processor, together with an Intel GMA4500MHD graphics processor.
Now, this official Kodi page:
http://kodi.wiki/view/Supported_hardware
says that with an Intel GMA X4500HD (basically same as what this machine has?) I should be able to get HW assisted decoding of H.264 video. But today I've loaded Ubuntu 14.10 onto the machine, and then Kodi 14.2 on top of that, and I am simply not getting the hardware assisted decoding of H.264 which the online Kodi documentation seems to suggest I should be getting. (The "o" display says "ff-h264" is the codec being used during play.)
Additionally, and more importantly, I am also not getting any hardware assist (under Ubuntu, at least) for MPEG2 video playback. The good news is that the CPU on this machine has enough power to do the MPEG2 decode of the material I want to be able to play (i.e. my ripped USA 480p DVDs). The bad news however is that under Ubuntu+Kodi(14.2) there is simply no (or very poor quality) deinterlacing occuring on these MPEG2 videos... making them essentially impossible to watch. Can anyone explain to me why?
I sure would like to understand this.
P.S. At first I had believed that the awful and/or non-existant MPEG2 deinterlacing on this specific Intel-based machine was due to some non-feature in OpenELEC, but I've just today gone to some lengths to prove that, in fact, no, the awful/missing MPEG2 deinterlacing is also present on the same hardware under even stock Ubuntu 14.10 plus stock Kodi 14.2. So this is not an OpenELEC problem. It's a Kodi problem. What's the solution?
P.P.S. On the same hardware, I actually was able to get excellent deinterlacing of my 480p MPEG2 DVD rips using Kodi 14.2 but only under Windows7 (where the codec used was "ff-mpeg2video-dxva2"). So this narrows things down even further. This is not a Kodi problem generally. It is only a Kodi-on-Linux problem.
The official specs for this laptop can be found here:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/01/msi-o...wind-u123/
The short version is that this machine contains a Intel ULV SU3500 (Core 2 Solo) processor, together with an Intel GMA4500MHD graphics processor.
Now, this official Kodi page:
http://kodi.wiki/view/Supported_hardware
says that with an Intel GMA X4500HD (basically same as what this machine has?) I should be able to get HW assisted decoding of H.264 video. But today I've loaded Ubuntu 14.10 onto the machine, and then Kodi 14.2 on top of that, and I am simply not getting the hardware assisted decoding of H.264 which the online Kodi documentation seems to suggest I should be getting. (The "o" display says "ff-h264" is the codec being used during play.)
Additionally, and more importantly, I am also not getting any hardware assist (under Ubuntu, at least) for MPEG2 video playback. The good news is that the CPU on this machine has enough power to do the MPEG2 decode of the material I want to be able to play (i.e. my ripped USA 480p DVDs). The bad news however is that under Ubuntu+Kodi(14.2) there is simply no (or very poor quality) deinterlacing occuring on these MPEG2 videos... making them essentially impossible to watch. Can anyone explain to me why?
I sure would like to understand this.
P.S. At first I had believed that the awful and/or non-existant MPEG2 deinterlacing on this specific Intel-based machine was due to some non-feature in OpenELEC, but I've just today gone to some lengths to prove that, in fact, no, the awful/missing MPEG2 deinterlacing is also present on the same hardware under even stock Ubuntu 14.10 plus stock Kodi 14.2. So this is not an OpenELEC problem. It's a Kodi problem. What's the solution?
P.P.S. On the same hardware, I actually was able to get excellent deinterlacing of my 480p MPEG2 DVD rips using Kodi 14.2 but only under Windows7 (where the codec used was "ff-mpeg2video-dxva2"). So this narrows things down even further. This is not a Kodi problem generally. It is only a Kodi-on-Linux problem.