[ROM][5.0.2] Unofficial CyanogenMOD 12 for MK808B-Plus - WeTek Gift

[Maverick5269]

No, and am not going to look into it because what really matters (aka video playback) is done at the proper resolution at kernel level. It's just Android's UI that is in 720p, and if you run games on it, you really wanna have half the pixels since the 450 MP2 is not suited for a 1080p resolution.

ohh. Sorry i though the videos were not really 1080p but extended 720p imstead-
in this case will Kodi run 1080p (true 1080p) kernel level?
Only the Android Gui will be 720p.
If that's the case agree that is better this way.


Thanks for answering this questions.


Cumps

[ChristianTroy]

That's the case, the video overlay will be bumped to 1080p in case output resolution is 1080p, it's something that has been added by Amlogic when they downgraded the S805 framebuffer, but it's a S805 thing only because I wanted to use something similar with the MX, without luck.

[DanielSB]

That's the case, the video overlay will be bumped to 1080p in case output resolution is 1080p, it's something that has been added by Amlogic when they downgraded the S805 framebuffer, but it's a S805 thing only because I wanted to use something similar with the MX, without luck.

I DID think that the output was strangely blocky on my 1440p screen (on all firmwares tested). I thought it was just me being overly sensitive to subpixel hinted 1080p upscaled to 1440p. Guess not But as you say, it makes sense with an underpowered GPU like this. There's a BUT, and it comes later in my post.

Anyway, I installed your firmware on my MK8080B Plus (had to remove the assert to flash it — had Finless 1.1 on it already). I've never seen Lollipop in action before, and it's beautiful. Also, my Apple keyboard worked out-of-the-box, which it does not on stock or Finless, so that was a nice surprise

Two updates were ready, and installing them took about five minutes, with strange lagging abound. I installed SpeedTest from Ookla to check if it might be due to some faulty WiFi stuff, but it achieved the same speeds (30+/10+ Mbps) as on stock and Finless. I did have to close Ookla and reopen it, as it didn't respond to input and once it opened, there was a frozen mouse cursor along with the working one (Ookla only runs in portrait mode, I think something funky happened because of that). Once reopened, I had to click strange places to hit buttons that weren't below the cursor.

Went into settings, and the mouse cursor lagged so much as to draw itself from three times a second to once every three seconds. However, after about ten minutes, the systems becomes super responsive (and the Ookla test neared 40 Mbps down, which none of the other firmwares is able to). Not sure yet if this wait is required on every boot, or if it's just the first one, but there you go.

Another thing I noticed, and this includes the BUT with regards to resolution, is that:

1) Netflix will not play anything in HD (and the UI looks like shizzles).
2) Kodi will not use hardware acceleration, and won't trigger 1080p res, it'll stay in 720p and HEVC playback will suck (I assume h264 will be software decoded, but that's just a guess). To fix, use XBMC from the stock firmware to get proper XBMC performance (the APK is included with the Finless 1.1 ROM for the same reason, and it works fine with Christian's firmware, so you can get it from there). THIS IS FOR THE PEOPLE COMPLAINING THAT OPENELEC IS FASTER -- if you're using Kodi, that's why. IME, Android is always faster.

Not sure what is actually needed to enable hardware acceleration and using the full res here... I noticed even on the stock ROM that Kodi would not be hardware accelerated, so obviously this has nothing to do with this marvellous CM12 FW.

Christian, you first breathed life into my Ainol Novo 7 Fire (which I later smashed in frustration of its hardware suckiness — a recommendable action, leaves you very satisfied ), and now you've given me CM12 on my ridiculously cheap MK808B Plus. Thank you!

Daniel

EDIT: Hmmm, and now I'm a bit concerned, because I thought I might be able to bring Netflix to 1080p country by doing a "wm size 1920x1080" as root. But that just gives me a downscaled version to 720p. This means there's currently no firmware that allows us to use Netflix (or any other app not explicitly doing some magic to get a 1080p overlay, or?) in full HD... That would leave OpenELEC, except I really want to stay with Android :/

EDIT 2: Same thing with YouTube —-- 720p all the way. Christian, is there any way you could make the system go 1080p overall? It seems slightly strange not to have the system go full res, when some of the most used apps --— Netflix and YouTube -- can't trigger 1080p... I know you didn't cause this and that this thing is just a (wonderful) gift, but you know... Might as well ask Would make this the definitive firmware (in my mind it already is, as these probs are the same on stock). Cheers

[ChristianTroy]

Netflix won't play in FHD because it requires OMX libraries with DASH (adaptive bitrate), like YouTube. Amlogic's OMX libraries don't support that; hopefully they will add it at some point.
I can't do anything as OMX libraries are as is, just precompiled.

The laggyness you experienced after first boot is the freaking art that is a cpu hog when doing upgrades (the s805 has a very weak cpu), in fact if it lags and you're connected by logcat you will see that dex2oat is compiling stuff.
After the first boot it will have updated google play services, a package bigger than 100MB, which takes quite some time to compile on the S805 (and won't let you install any package before updating both gms and play store). Another pretty slow package is Google Search (Google Now), approximately all packages big in size will take longer to install because of art that has to compile the apk.

Use nightly builds of Kodi, HEVC will surely not work with 14.x since there's no support for it but you'll have to run 15.x nightlies, or SPMC. (in Kodi nightlies auto framerate switch works as well).

If it still doesn't work for you have a look at logcat, if you see something like "AML: no proper permission, please contact the device vendor. Skipping codec..." it's a permission problem, but shouldn't happen since I set the correct permissions in a init.d script

edit:

as you can see from 20150428 Kodi nightly both screenshots are using "am-" decoders

[Maverick5269]

Hi Christian,

Thanks for this great ROM.
The latest Nightly on the Kodi works very good. Didn't saw any troubles on that.
The lag is only seen on this rom 2-3 minutes after the boot it stays somewhat laggy, but after i think it is very fluid with the Lollipop.
The Youtube is a little laggy until is fullscreen, but this is something already happened before.

Just a question the HEVC is not enabled because the AMlogic SDK right?
On the Kodi only sees 2 cores is because the others are stopped as dont needed?


Thanks once more. This is a great great rom.


Cumps

[DanielSB]

Thank you, Christian, for the tips and for clearing up the OMX stuff Too bad Netflix won't work -- are the OMX libraries the same in the stock firmware offering no Netflix HD, do you know? Or is it a LP problem?

Oh, and thanks for clearing up the ART thing as well. Makes sense

I was also wondering if there's any way to get the UI to output 1920x1080? Since the wmode doesn't do anything, and none of the apps I've tried do either, I was wondering if there's something I could do as root in a terminal to change it? Cheers

Thanks again

EDIT: I've scoured around a bit, and I'm a bit puzzled... Examining /sys/devices/virtual/amdhdmitx/amdhdmitx0/*, I can confirm that we're outputting 1080p (VIC:16). Actually, duh, just checked my screen input which says 1080p, too Dummy me Where is this UI 720p output configured? Confused :/

[ChristianTroy]

You should change the framebuffer configuration using fbset, but this will break Amlogic's dynamic resolution management. If you need 1080p get a S812 device that is even faster and never lags

OMX libraries come from Amlogic Lollipop SDK.

@maverick
HEVC works like a dream as you can see in the first screenshot: "dc:am-h265", it won't work on Helix build because Kodi hasn't support for it (it works in Chinese roms because they run the customized version of XBMC 14,0 from Amlogic), but if you get a nightly that is Isengaard based it will work.

Don't care about what Kodi says about cores, dropped frames and fps, those values are not accurate.

After boot mediascanner scans all folders that don't contain a ".nomedia" file, plus all apps that have a BroadcastReceiver for BOOT_COMPLETED intent will start, so it's perfectly normal that it has to assest, just think what happens with a PC without an SSD speeding it up (and even the crappiest cpu from 10 years ago is twice more powerful than the s805).

You can't expect better performances from a 30$ device guys If I go out to eat a pizza and a beer I will spend more :P
The SOC is very weak, but surprisingly good for the price of the device

[DanielSB]

You should change the framebuffer configuration using fbset, but this will break Amlogic's dynamic resolution management. If you need 1080p get a S812 device that is even faster and never lags

OMX libraries come from Amlogic Lollipop SDK.

Thank you I guess if this is dynamically changeable, I wouldn't mind that, as I can just create scripts to switch back and forth when using and not using Kodi.

Though, I don't see that I have an "fbset" binary on this firmware? Sorry for being daft :/

I was looking around for possible solutions, and some Allwinner SoC users had the same gripe, which someone fixed by changing how the framebuffer is initialized on boot. Seems similar to your suggestion, although AFAICU, this was done by modifying the bootloader, but I'm not all that sure how I'd go about doing that... Obviously, being able to issue an "fbset" command at runtime would be awesome, but is that possible?

Thanks again man

EDIT: Seems I needed a newer BusyBox - the one included does not provide fbset. (Btw, this app opened in portrait mode and once again it made me unable to click on some buttons while I had to click way off the target to hit others. Something seems to be amiss with the portrait mode in the firmware. I installed Set Orientation app and forced landscape mode to work around it ). Anyway, I managed to triger 1920x1080 with fbest, but it just created a seriously garbled display which looks like each field of an interlaced frame being positioned on different parts of the screen, with some garbled pixels added. I could sort of see the terminal output, so I managed to write an fbset command to revert to 720p, but it failed with some error ending in "cannot allocate memory". Is there a WM restart thing or similar I need to do afterwards? Thanks

[ChristianTroy]

It's not that straight forward, you have to know how the Amlogic code interacts with the frame buffer to set up a resolution, because of this I say "let it go", I won't offer any support on this, I'm sorry.

[DanielSB]

It's not that straight forward, you have to know how the Amlogic code interacts with the frame buffer to set up a resolution, because of this I say "let it go", I won't offer any support on this, I'm sorry.

Fair enough I tried some different configurations, but couldn't find one that worked. Thanks for your help, though

EDIT: I really hope AMLogic will come up with a driver that runs the framebuffer in 1080p and supports DASH... Picasa also runs 720p, so browsing images sucks :'(

[Maverick5269]

Hi Christian,

Yes, indeed with Isengaard Kodi, the same runs everything fine until now.
The Kodi says 1080p in the nightly i'm using.
Everything appears ok.
Only seen some slowdowns on the YouTube application, but you already explained that the OMX is something AMlogic need to fix in a newer SDK.

Thanks for all the patience you have explaining all the points.

once again thanks


Cumps

[jasiujasiu]

Hi
I try install this ROM but wifi doesn't work.
In stock firmware everything is ok, after upgrade to 109k4 device cannot discover any SSID, in cm12 the same problem.

Can you help me ?

[ChristianTroy]

Because you will surely have the mk808b with the realtek wifi, this works for broadcom

[computaquark]

I tried the link to clockwork mod recovery image and was redirected to a web page for a privacy app called MEGA.  Not sure where to go from there.  Is there another link to the same recovery image or have I missed something obvious?  Will any CM12 recovery image work?

[ChristianTroy]

Try using Chrome, or if using Android install the official Mega app (it's a cloud storage thing)