OTHER Linux Standalone KODI and 4:2:2

iBoston

SatelliteGuys Pro
Original poster
Jul 15, 2014
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North Central
The original Amazon FireTV with KODI installed, supported 4:2:2 encoding. But, the unit was not quite fast enough to handle it without glitches.

Is anyone aware of a modern stand-a-lone unit that has KODI and supports the 4:2:2 sampling?

I have two chinese made kodi boxes that DO NOT support 4:2:2, so, just because its running kodi is no guarantee it will process the 4:2:2
 
Just to be clear about this, the issue that you are probably encountering is that almost all other FTA formats use hardware decoding. In other words, your computer has a dedicated GPU chip or GPU circuitry, and the decoding of most types of video is handed off to that. BUT, for whatever reason, 4:2:2 doesn't seem to be supported by GPU chips, so that decoding has to be done by the CPU, and the reason you get glitches is because the CPU is also trying to do other tasks simultaneously. If you have a way to monitor CPU and GPU usage in real time you will see that when you play a 4:2:2 recording, the GPU isn't used at all and the CPU may be maxed out, or very close to it.

What I don't know, but someone else probably does, is whether it's because 4:2:2 video is sent using some compression format that the current crop of GPU's can't handle, for example HEVC. If so that means that you might have problems with certain other feeds that are not 4:2:2 but that will be switching to HEVC. The recordings will probably be just fine, it's just that the GPU's in most computers may not be able to handle the compression format. You always have the option of pre-processing the video file to convert it to a more GPU-friendly format before watching, using something like ffmpeg (or one of the several GUI frontends for ffmpeg), but typically that will take an hour or two or possibly longer, depending on the length of the original recording and the speed of the computer doing the conversion. Hopefully someday GPU chips/circuitry will start supporting the newer formats, but if any already do I'm not aware of it, nor of what computers might contain those newer chips.

If the glitches are not too bad, you may be able to minimize them by starting your video player using the "nice" command in Linux or (I think) MacOS, in this case your want the video player to be "not nice" and hog every bit of CPU power it can get, so you'd use something like nice -20 video_player. This doesn't mean you will never see a glitch, but they should hopefully be less frequent and of shorter duration.
 
To add to the above (for some reason the system won't let me edit it), I made a short sample 4:2:2 recording and used MedioInfo to show the codec being used, which in this case was something called AVC ("Advanced Video Codec"), not HEVC. I don't know enough about codecs or GPU's to know if that particular one is something unusual enough that most GPU's can't deal with it, but I suspect it is.

(And when I used the phrase "compression format" in my previous message, I meant codec. My brain doesn't work very well this early in the morning!)
 
I already know i can do with with a PC/Linux system, but i want to utilize a standalone KODI box such as a Amazon Fire or one of the Many Chinese ones.
 
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