[nikkoaki]

I just saw an article on freaktabe about all amlogic code to be removed from kodi 19 ( https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/16043/files ).
I'm a little confused, wasn't the amlogic support removed fom kodi with krypton? I remember the the option to enable amcodec acceleration disappeared. In fact, googling about that subject shows a lot of results from 2017 from this forum, of people saying that amcodec support was dropped.
That leads me to another question: why does my very old android box runs fine with mediacodec? It has an old amlogic 905 soc and android lolipop and yet, it plays fine 4k 60 fps content, avc or hevc.. (i pressed "o" and it says it's using amc-h264 (HW) which is android mediacodec, right?) with amcodec disabled (on jarvis) or missing (krypton and leia). Why do i read online so many people complaining that they had to move from android to libre/openelec in order to maintain hardware acceleration with krypton, if it seems to run fine without the amlogic specific codecs? I know that newer soc's do run fine with mediacodec on newer versions of android, but this is a very old and cheap box. Am i missing something?
Thanks in advance.

[Klojum]

The key word here is "old". Lots of android boxes still work with old Linux kernels and also have very fragmented (=time consuming for developers) hardware support. The big idea is to start applying a more overall and single approach towards graphics handling with an up-to-date Linux kernel. Lots of initials steps have been taken, but many more are still to come.

So yes, some of the old boxes work just fine doing 4K60, but many tricks and sidesteps were necessary to make it work. It's too much work to do this separately for every chipset out there.

This may shed some light on the subject: https://libreelec.tv/2018/09/development-update/

[wrxtasy]

And for AMLogic Android, yes from Kodi Krypton onwards Kodi started using the standard Android Mediacodec API, dropping Android AMLcodec hardware decoding.

Hardware decoding and OTA TV deinterlacing on low powered AMLogic Android devices has never really been the same since due to AMLogic really only wanting to support online progressive video streaming compression.

[nikkoaki]

Thanks for your explanations.