[abga]

@popcornmix 

Thank you for providing the link from LE in the Kodi Forum, which I find rather non-relevant to what I actually reported:
https://wiki.libreelec.tv/hardware/raspberry-pi

- its title and content  is about HEVC, which I'm not playing/using, but only MPEG2 & H264

- then it contains false statements like "Raspberry Pi 2/1/0 models can normally manage 720p media but will struggle with 1080p." I never had any issues with 108p H264 media (local files / internet streams) on Pi0 (initial version) and Pi2B (never owned a Pi1), with both HW accel. and SW playback, but only with PVR if OpenMAX was not used. Even without OpenMAX, playback of PVR looks fine, it's just the waw-waw audio (Kodi 17/18 MMAL) & video (Kodi 19.x) effect that is annoying. Given that OpenMAX handles the playback perfectly, actually very efficient too, it's the Kodi default player and its implementation that kills the Pi performance.

- and ambiguity  ( plus  non-relevance - not using LE but focusing only on Kodi) - "LibreELEC 10.x also dropped support for Raspberry Pi Zero and other 512MB RAM devices as 1GB is now considered as the minimum RAM needed for a good Kodi experience." Why that? I mean, one of the secondary reasons  (I didn't mention before, trying to be respectful towards the LE devs & their work) I'm not using LE is because I find it bloated (Kodi itself full of features) and the OS, even if stripped, is still more bloated compared to Slackware.

I did report issues with PVR only, and according to my experience (feedback I presented in the previous post) I only get OOM's in a very particular case while playing HD Channels - 1080p H264 for longer time and switching the channel to another HD Channel. Again, it looks like memory management issues (cleaning up buffers (garbage) before switching to another HD channel) and not that much memory limitations.

Anyways, I'm convinced now I need to sell the remaining Raspberry "arsenal" I own and focus on some SH x86 thin clients for media consumption under Kodi, as OpenMAX, the only implementation that really excelled, became history.
Watching PVR (tvheadend) is still my main "media" activity.

[popcornmix]

Why that? I mean, one of the secondary reasons  (I didn't mention before, trying to be respectful towards the LE devs & their work) I'm not using LE is because I find it bloated (Kodi itself full of features) and the OS, even if stripped, is still more bloated compared to Slackware.

Calling LE bloated makes no sense. It is absolutely minimal.

Kodi is the reason you can't run on on a 512M device any more.
Partly the switch from confluence to estuary skin (which is much heavier), and partly due to the removal of Pi specific code.

[abga]

The context I called LE bloated was CPU&MEM usage, which is what counted in the discussion. Indeed, storage wise is thin, crippled too - given the BusyBox stuff and the lack of useful tools (not to mention how messed up the kernel is with all those overlapped partitions and symlinks - I tried to put my patched kernel in place and abandoned shortly after). But the latter is understandable, given the LE folks effort to minimize the bandwidth usage on their D/L repository.
But all this is off-topic and has no value here in the thread & in the Kodi Forum.

Keep up the good work! & Many thanks for all your efforts&inputs&resourcefulness, you really helped me on the Raspberry "ride".
My advice (even now, after ditching the Raspberry platform for multimedia use) you should try to focus on a synchronous playback of audio/video on the Pi (maybe take inspiration form OpenMAX), instead of constantly trying to sync audio & video during playback. It doesn't work (for already 3 versions now Kodi 17.x & 18.x (with MMAL) and Kodi 19.x with gbm ) and the experience is pure rubbish.

P.S. Besides, I don't know what you tried to prove with the reference to the removal of Raspberry platform specific code. Both Kodi & FFMpeg source code still needs Raspberry platform specific code (plenty of patches).

[HiassofT]

I have no idea why you are ranting that much but I have the feeling you'd be better off taking 100-200 bucks out of your piggy bank and buy an Apple TV - they might be a bit more expensive than a RPiZeroW2 but you don't need to fiddle around and they just work.

so long,

Hias

[abga]

@HiassofT 

If it wasn't you, who helped me at times, I wouldn't have replied to the false accusations but ignore the off-topic rubbish straight away.

I wasn't ranting but struggling to build Kodi myself (the topic) and highlighted that the Raspberry Pi - up to the Pi3B platform is unable to play PVR content properly for the last 3 versions of Kodi (19.x inclusive).
And even the working Kodi 17.x with OpenMAX was "destroyed" by some engineer at Raspberry, who out of exuberance/nativity (or maybe the drive to justify his salary - inventing work) managed to overwhelm the GPU with the latest "audio redux" improvement. This later movement caused some extra expenses for me - 20EUR for the external HDMI DAC (which I need to sell now together with the Raspberries I own). One could consider it a form of fraud from the Raspberry Ltd. , which presents the Raspberry platform (2B for instance)  as providing an 3,5 audio analogue output, which I as a customer would consider functional when purchasing. But all these have nothing to do with Kodi and the Kodi team and this forum.

Regarding your price estimations for an x86 alternative, I said I'll look for a SH thin client and already found some HP T430 Thin Clients - Intel Celeron N4000 with 4GB DDR4 & 32GB SSD at 60EUR (incl. shipment). More than enough for my PVR playback&streaming requirements. Actually, the "unavailable" Pi4B is nowhere close to this performance, in CPU/GPU/bus/connectivity/storage & co.

so long,,,,,

[HiassofT]

Well, the RPi H264 decoders are specced at Hi Level 4.0 - which means 1080p30, so 1080p60 was always a gamble and you need to overclock various HW blocks.

Kodi also got fat and even a 1GB device is borderline with current Kodi Matrix/Nexus - you can get away a bit with using less heavier skins, play around with CMA memory (which is used for GPU - the 256 MB default on RPi 2/3 often isn't enough as Kodi seems to spike GPU memory, allocating new blocks before older ones are freed) and make sure all artwork textures are cached before (Kodi seems to ignore the limit on parallel texture jobs, so even if it's set to 1 it'll start 3 parallel threads to create thumbnails - which will fail miserably if you eg have 50Mpix pictures in your picture collection).

So, even on a 1GB device using Kodi is tricky, on a 512MB device it's a lot worse. Kodi will play videos fine (even HD) if you got the overclocking right but navigating through your movies library or your picture collection will often lead to a crash as it doesn't have enough memory available.

These are all well known issues and using an RPi4 with 2 or 4GB of RAM will save you from this hassles.

If you want to use older RPis then use them with older Kodi/RPiOS/LibreELEC/... versions - and avoid the RPi0W2.

so long,

Hias

[abga]

All the performance limitations and tweaks you presented are well known to me and it's why I took the effort to strip & build my own Kodi binary. More of a "vanilla" version without all the whistles & bells, tailored for my particular usage.
Kodi 19.x works perfectly fine on a Pi2B with 1 GB RAM (and the obvious "little" overclocking), used my build for a few days until I got sick of it. It's just that the PVR playback suffers from constant slowdown/speedup on both audio&video and the analogue audio crackling like crazy. For the latter I bought the external HDMI audio extractor.

Well, that's the thing, I'm stuck on Kodi17.x and I see no way to get on the latest developments. Kodi 17.x still works perfectly fine, even without any overclocking, it's just that some addons stopped working.  It's pretty much EOL, no expectations.

I'm not confident that the Pi4B plays PVR well, which is my main usage. It's the rather weird playback method, constantly adjusting/syncing the playback and not handling properly the somewhat inconsistent DVB streams (should drop corrupted frames - OMX Player does it just fine).

Anyways, I kinda had enough - years of guinea pig experience with the Raspberries