On Mon, 4 Jan 2021 15:50:48 +0100 Stefan Seyfried <stefan.seyfried@googlemail.com> wrote:
On 04.01.21 13:47, Torsten Duwe wrote:
Hi all!
Our current HTPC runs happily with Leap + Kodi, but it's too bulky for most of the prospected new furniture ;)
HTPC == only play back local / streaming media, no live TV via DVB-S/T/C?
Well, the current PC has a twin DVB-S2 tuner in a PCIe x1 slot. This is one of the major problems for a non-x86 replacement. I look at the LibreELEC RPi3 next door with envy. But it needs to hook into the second tuner of the PC for a live signal.
After a lot of research for FLOSS, I consider to replace it with a Ferguson Ariva ATV TT [1]. The Hisilicon hi3798cv200 seems to be designed specifically for STBs and is supported mainline, and even the reference board's DTS (hi3798cv200-poplar.dts) only hooks up a few LEDs to GPIOs. I assume H.264 on Panfrost works?
I don't know what panfrost is, but if it is not a software decoder then I doubt it will work. And if it is a software decoder, then I doubt the chips performance will be good enough, and integrating the bits and pieces for live tv will be ... interesting.
Since VAAPI is buggy for MPEG-2, the current PC decodes it on a <1GHz CPU core and sends it to the Radeon HD 6xxx (or so) for scaling. (H.264 does work via VAAPI and hardware) Panfrost is the code name for Mali-6xx / Mali-7xx GPUs in Mesa/kernel, and I estimated a Cortex-A53 with ASIMD should be capable, with some help from the T720MP, to decode H.264 in software. The specialised video engine is an indicator that it would at least run a little hot trying to do it this way.
My biggest concern however is the SoC's support for secure boot. Alternative firmware images for Ferguson boxes show now hints towards that, but maybe someone here can confirm this? Any other hints or pointers?
The main market of this linux Satellite TV boxes is still stealing/sharing paytv subscriptions. The manufacturers will not do anthing like "secure boot" that will prevent people from shipping their favourite custom image. In fact most of the manufacturers do not even try to provide their own software but just ship some variant of openATV or openPLI, or they ship somehting akin to "openDOS" in old PC days: Software solely made to be replaced before first boot ;-)
So I would not worry about secure boot, if the box is sold with "e2" on its label.
One even gets the choice between android TV, debian and enigma2. Ferguson is a Polish company BTW.
But I would also not hope for a recent kernel, a documented boot mechanism, good drivers.
And do not even dream about open source drivers ;-)
I did when I saw the mainline kernel support :(
But for the unlikely case that I'm wrong and the box has all that, then I'd be interested to hear about your success, my STI7111 boxes are growing old now and the platform is long abandoned by ST ;-)
Yes, it's hard. For the record: the runner-up company was Vu+, but the only 64-bit box they made[1] is deprecated and I don't feel like running Tumbleweed or building another 32-bit distro locally[2]. Thanks for the input. Torsten [1] https://vuplus.de/produkte/detail/17/?p=17 [2] http://code.vuplus.com/index.php?action=start