(2015-11-09, 16:23)rykr Wrote: Couple of questions.
1. Is amc-mpeg2 some type of hardware decoder?
Probably - there are multiple approaches to Android video decoding ISTR - based on chipsets. AIUI the Google Nexus Player is based on an Intel Atom SoC, but the FireTV is based on a Qualcomm ARM-based device. The video replay route used on one may be different to another.
Quote:2. Is the use of ff-mpeg2 on the Fire TV a function of Kodi? Meaning could a future update of Kodi start using a hardware decoder that is on the fire tv? I find it hard to believe that a hw decoder is not there with it being able to do 4k.
Possibly - I think there are ffmpeg builds on some platforms that themselves use hardware acceleration, but it sounds like this isn't the case?
The real issue is that Android on Kodi has changed direction I think. Originally the Android APIs for video acceleration were close to non-existent so early Android builds included hardware specific video replay solutions to access the hardware directly, or independently of the official Android APIs. This meant that Android Kodi was pretty fragmented with different modules to support different types of hardware - AMLogic, Intel etc.
However with newer releases of Android, Google improved the video playback APIs, meaning it was possible to use APIs and avoid fragmentation. I believe this is the route that Kodi for Android now favours, so newer SoCs don't have specific video replay support, and instead use the standard Google Android solutions.
I think that Google may not support MPEG2 via this route, though, as it is an old codec that isn't found on web-based content for streaming, and is really only found on DVD and Broadcast TV that are still using standards set nearly two decades ago.
As a result whilst H264 and newer codecs get hardware acceleration, MPEG2 falls back to ffmpeg software acceleration? If Kodi doesn't include a workaround to access the FireTV's MPEG2 acceleration, or indeed if the FireTV doesn't have or expose MPEG2 acceleration, then this may be as good as you get. This is where Linux solutions have a bit of a benefit I guess.
Koying - please feel free to correct me...