[Milhouse]

@Milhouse is it possible to add experimental splash video for RPi on my nuc?

I like the new splah video on my rpi3b+

I wonder if this is possible to do this on my nuc?

Thanks!

It's possible, yes, but it won't be easy. That's why it remains an "experimental" (ie. just-for-fun) feature on the RPi and is unlikely to be merged as it's not something that can be supported by all other LibreELEC projects (x86_64, Amlogic, Rockchip, and unknown future hardware/devices etc.).

The thing is that the RPi has always had a very simple OMX-based h264 video player available with GPU acceleration, and in order to add splash video support for x86_64 we'd need a very simply hardware accelerated h264 video player too. When you consider that we'd need to support all the various x86_64 video drivers plus video APIs (Intel/AMD VAAPI, as well as Nvidia/AMD VDPAU etc.) AND either framebuffer or x11/Wayland window managers it's no longer a simple task (and unlikely to be a 223 line programme as it is for RPi!)

And then we'd need the same kind of "simple hardware accelerated video player" for all of the Rockchip and Amlogic devices, and any other devices we may support in future, and I've no idea if that's possible for the current devices let alone future devices (I suspect it's not possible).

And decoding the video in software isn't really an option as the idea is that the splash video is played "for free" while Kodi loads - software decode would steal cycles from the CPU which is working hard to bring up the rest of the LibreELEC OS and finally the Kodi application.

Besides, on x86_64 LE and Kodi typically starts so quickly that a splash video would significantly slow down the startup process. The startup video is 14 seconds long and a typical RPi3+ (with fast SD card) takes about 11-12 seconds for Kodi to get to the point where it is ready to display the Kodi splash or - if the kodi splash is disabled - the Kodi GUI. Kodi will wait for the splash video to play out before showing the Kodi splash image or Kodi GUI, and on an RPi3+ the splash video will delay the appearance of the Kodi splash/GUI by up to 2 seconds. An RPi3 will be slower, and there is unlikely to be any delay to Kodi resulting from the video as Kodi will not be ready before the video ends (what you'll have is a period of black screen between the video ending and the Kodi splash/GUI appearing). With RPi2, RPi1 and RPi0 the period between video ending and Kodi splash/GUI appearing will be even longer.

With x86_64, adding a splash video would mean that Kodi is now always delayed by several seconds waiting for the video to end as Kodi generally starts so much more quickly than even an RPi3+ - on my i5 Skylake NUC with nvme, the Kodi splash image is never seen (even though it is enabled) as it is replaced by the Kodi GUI almost instantly, which itself only appears _after_ my computer monitor has finished changing refresh rate!

There has been discussion about adding splash video support to Kodi (by which I mean that someone has asked "wouldn't it be nice if we could do this" and other people said "yes"), which would work on all platforms, but this isn't ideal (IMHO) as now there will be a long delay while the OS loads (where nothing happens - just the LibreELEC splash image), then the Kodi application loads, and instead of displaying the GUI it plays a video for several seconds, only to THEN display the Kodi GUI. Perhaps on RPi we could use the OS splash video support which interleaves the splash video playback with Kodi startup, but on all other systems we use the "native" Kodi splash video feature. But as of right now, Kodi splash video support is not even on the horizon.

tl;dr: I added the RPi splash video for a couple of reasons - it was easy to do, and there is time to kill while waiting for Kodi to load on slower ARM systems. Neither reason is true for x86_64, nor is the first reason likely to be true for other non-RPi systems.