Hello Kodi Team
It seems after a lot of time and debates and fights and all kind of legal /non legal gpl and non gpl stuff the Allwinner (A80) CedarX 2.0 vpu/gpu code is public.
https://github.com/allwinner-zh/media-codec
My question is simple, will be able to use Linux Kodi with gpu/vpu hardware aceleration on Allwinner SoC's any time soon?
Thank you for reading and considering
from a very quick look, this seems like the usual allwinner bullshit "release". Binary libs, instead of full source.
Licensing seems to be solved (more or less)
https://github.com/allwinner-zh/media-co...er/LICENSE
According to Cubieboard 4 linaro trusty ubuntu based OS on A80 platform foundable here
http://dl.cubieboard.org/model/cc-a80/Im...report.pdf
almost all type of video content is properly decoded (more or less)....except maybe h265 and few more less usual video formats.
I have tried to install kodi package.... but
when launching it i have only black screen.
Sunxi not very interested into porting Kodi or making it to work on allwinner SoC's
As for AW seems they have new management which showing more opening to the desires of users and developers so i think it should be a start after all somewhere.
I am a regular user and tbh i like the brute power of A80 and i would like it with OpenElec / Kodi runing.
Allwinner have released full source code of CedarX2.0 now.
(2015-07-07, 07:57)wink Wrote: [ -> ]Allwinner have released full source code of CedarX 2.0 now.
Have they? Have they now really released the full SOURCE CODE and not just a mixture of source code and binary librarys as before?
If they really released the full source code now are they also fully compying with the open source licenses and license their source code files correctly too?
Last I read here they still violate GPL and LGPL open source licenses, read these new news posts:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n...-Violation
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ne...r-Joins-LF
(2015-07-07, 10:54)RockerC Wrote: [ -> ]Have they? Have they now really released the full SOURCE CODE and not just a mixture of source code and binary librarys as before?
It seem like there are no blobs anymore, in the initial release there were shared binary libs of the video encoder and decoder and now the sources of these libs are available.
Edit: Oh wait, they still pulling binary shared libs from https://github.com/allwinner-zh/media-codec-lib with the git submodule
Personally I had a bad experience with two "low powered" Allwinner based devices, the SoC was overheating and freeze up, open sourcing vpu libs won't make me buy these devices.
As expected crappy documentation
Code:
## option for chip config.
OPTION_CHIP_1623 = 1
OPTION_CHIP_1625 = 2
OPTION_CHIP_1633 = 3
OPTION_CHIP_1651 = 4
OPTION_CHIP_1650 = 5
OPTION_CHIP_1661 = 6
OPTION_CHIP_1667 = 7
OPTION_CHIP_1639 = 8
OPTION_CHIP_1673 = 9
OPTION_CHIP_1680 = 10
OPTION_CHIP_1681 = 11
OPTION_CHIP_1689 = 12
sunxi-tools explain some of these (AFAIK these are all the ARM based SoC from Allwinner)
Code:
const char *soc_name="unknown";
switch (buf.soc_id) {
case 0x1623: soc_name="A10";break;
case 0x1625: soc_name="A13";break;
case 0x1633: soc_name="A31";break;
case 0x1651: soc_name="A20";break;
case 0x1650: soc_name="A23";break;
case 0x1639: soc_name="A80";break;
}
p.s. 18K line of configure script can't be normal.
(2015-07-07, 12:15)dhead Wrote: [ -> ]p.s. 18K line of configure script can't be normal.
/opt/src/kodi $ wc -l configure
35581 configure
yep having only(!) 18k lines can't be right
They still violate the GPL/LGPL, because what they did now is only a complete rewrite of their video engine userspace driver. There still isn't any source code release for the binaries, which they released (or were kind of leaked) in history and are blamed for GPL violation.
The new driver includes support for H264 and MPEG1/2/4 (with source code released) and the rest of the codecs is included via a closed library (without sources). But I have not tested that myself... and won't do.
The funny thing is, that the opened codecs H264 and MPEG1/2/4 have already been reverse engineered and are implemented in a libvdpau backend - for Allwinner there was nothing basic to hide anymore.
So, if anyone is interested in supporting A10/A20 for kodi, i suggest to start with the REed driver... The code should be ready, it only has to be done.
Regards
rellla
Hi there,
I have been following this problem for a lot of time and a question comes to my mind.
Why don't you push Allwinner to go via non-gpl module like ATI/AMD and Nvidia?
Why would we do that. We enforce open source as much as possible because thats the spirit of any open source project.
