[AtomBox]

Hello there,

I am since 2011 the proud owner of this little box https://www.asus.com/Mini-PCs/S1AT5NM10E/ on which I replaced the BT/WIFI pcie adapter with the BCM70015 CrystalHD card.
Kodi has dropped the specific support for CrystalHD acceleration since Helix so I've been using Gotham uptill now for mediacenter software and DVB-recording/playing using a Technisat Cablestar Combo HD CI.
https://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/T...ombo_HD_CI
However a lot of addons are not compatible anymore with Gotham so I am looking for alternatives. Also my tv-recordings are split up into 2GB parts which I find to be a problem as I convert those recordings to MKV-files and audio gets out of sync.

Thus I was wondering whether installing Kodi with XUbuntu with the latest CrystalHD drivers would be a solution. Broadcom released new CrystalHD-drivers at November 3th 2014 which are stated to be optimized and improved to the use in mediacenter applications. https://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal-hd
When I install XUbuntu and do a config/make compile with those CrystalHD drivers, my device will be running H.264 en/decoding through the CrystalHD-adapter and software e.g. MythTV will be running smoothly. I was wondering whether Kodi would still make use of this BCM70015-adapter when playing/recording H.264-material even though the explicit support was stopped or that it simply would bypass it and merely use the inadequate CPU to try and do this job. Can some shed some light on this issue?

I am really a Kodi fan but I have to be a realist too. So when Kodi would not make use of the hardware, I would have to fallback to other options.


Kind Regards,
Robert

[Starstream]

According to the Asus webpage you linked to your box has an Nvidia Ion GPU which decodes H.264 video in hardware (I had one back in the day), have you tried removing the CrystalHD from the system and instead just letting it use the Nvidia GPU ? Nvidia on linux is VPDAU I think so you might have to manually select that in the video decoding settings of Kodi.

The decoding path for CrystalHD has been dropped from Kodi internally, changing drivers will do nothing. If the Nvidia GPU is no longer good enough then it's time for an upgrade, an Intel NUC would serve you well.

[AtomBox]

According to the Asus webpage you linked to your box has an Nvidia Ion GPU which decodes H.264 video in hardware (I had one back in the day), have you tried removing the CrystalHD from the system and instead just letting it use the Nvidia GPU ? Nvidia on linux is VPDAU I think so you might have to manually select that in the video decoding settings of Kodi.

The decoding path for CrystalHD has been dropped from Kodi internally, changing drivers will do nothing. If the Nvidia GPU is no longer good enough then it's time for an upgrade, an Intel NUC would serve you well.

Thanks for your reply.

The ION H.264 Decoding did not work through the Intel Direct Media Interface (DMI) because of a patent issue nvidia had with intel. This is the reason I installed the crystalhd adapter when I set it up.
It's unclear to me whether this patent issue has been resolved since 2011 but I wil give it a try. I will set up VDPAU on ION in stead of VAAPI like you suggest and see. Thanks for the info on that.

On XBMC Gotham the box performs good and H.264 decoding is fine so the hardware can do it. A NUC is a barebone with a intel IGP and it is not a lot faster then my current box so when kodi doesn't support the decoding hardware sufficiently I would for now choose to install something like MythBuntu on Linux or even Media Center on Windows 10 to watch/record television and run kodi from my S805 android stick. I was just wondering whether Kodi would make use of my system resources. The addons in Kodi make it interesting but I am having trouble with the most popular ones like Genesis and Channel1 lately. Kodi is only as popular as its addons.

But I will see if the patent issue on the DMI-interface is resolved and post results.

Kind regards,
Robert