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Hey there, I've read every post in this thread, but I'm still confused about a couple of things. I'm hoping someone knowledgeable can clarify.
I've got a Pi 4. Using instructions on this forum, I successfully built both the ordinary Kodi 19.1 and the popcornmix fork, but I'm not getting hardware decoding with either. (At least, I assume I'm not. CPU use is very high with h264 and h265 videos are unplayably slow.) Changing the dtoverlay settings around doesn't seem to make a difference. I've checked that I'm not seeing permission issues with the graphics acceleration devices in /dev.
Questions:
1. Is hardware video decoding supposed to work, out of the box, with ordinary Kodi built with the GBM target? Or is a fork still required?
2. What exactly are the changes in the popcornmix / graysky2 forks? (I have tried to crawl through the changelogs, but they're extremely uninformative about what the overall purpose of the fork is, and the README is unmodified so there's no explanation.) Should I prefer one fork over the other?
3. If the changes in these forks are necessary to get hardware decoding on the Pi, why haven't they been upstreamed?
4. I thought the point of switching to GBM was that stuff like hardware decoding was just going to work, easily and out of the box, in the future. Is that not the case? Why does the Pi seemingly still require a bunch of hacks?
5. Does anyone have HDR working with Kodi on a generic Linux distribution for the Pi 4? I'd like to have it working, but I'm not interested in using a special purpose distro with a bunch of hacks slapped together that can't be upstreamed or generalized.
6. Are there any settings in Kodi that need to be changed to get things working correctly on the Pi 4? I saw upthread someone mentioned enabling PRIME but I don't think that should be necessary(?).
Thank you all for your time and expertise. I think clarification of these issues would be useful to many people, as it's currently quite hard for newbies like me to figure out exactly what the status of Pi 4 support is.