[EXPERIMENTAL] Unofficial CM12 for WeTek Play with Kodi & TVH Live TV

[adoga]

One question. Do I have to install GAPPS if I update to the latest you posted up here? Will I loose anything?

[ChristianTroy]

There's an upgrade instructions in the opening post. BTW flash gapps and don't do any wipe and you won't lose anything


edit:

tried my bluetooth headset, no skips, no problems apart from an audio settings that you have to put (you have to add 250ms of audio delay in audio settings when using bt) that could be fixed by this patch, but that will cause out of sync on non bluetooth playback.

If wifi is turned off (even if not connected) try to turn it off, otherwise it might be your wifi channel or one of your neighboor that is causing interferences.

[ChristianTroy]

I came out to a nasty workaround for that bluetooth latency stuff on Amlogic... I'm not going to release it in the main apk because it's a nasty workaround, I'd like to do something better (but most of Kodi code is c++ and I don't know much about jni to be able to call java code from c++ code, will have to study it a bit)...

For now I have modified AESinkAUDIOTRACK.cpp to check for a connected USB headset using Android's "dumpsys", but I don't like this solution that much, anyway I uploaded the apk that you can download HERE, this one won't require you to set a delay of 200-250ms when using a bluetooth headphone in Kodi.

If you use SuperSU disable the toast for root notification or it will pop up a bit too much

[ChristianTroy]

Real 1080p output

By flashing this zip you will enable full 1920x1080 output on CM11 2015-03-12 build.

Notes:
* it will work ONLY with 1080p resolutions, don't set any other resolution
* high bitrate live tv channels will mostly have skips because of high cpu usage. Android is not like OE where there's nothing but Kodi running and this out of spec behavior is a lot stressful for the cpu
* to go back just flash 2015-03-12 build (and gapps) on top of it without any wipe

[adoga]

I have installed and tested your "ROM (CM11) 2015-03-12" which you posted yesterday and found it a bit more stable than the last one.

Here are my findings:

1 - Playback of HD TV is better but uses alot of CPU ( 1 cpu always 100%, 2nd cpu between 70 - 100%)

2 - Using your latest Kodi in you last response to my post. Plays movies excellent, I tried it with 3D movie, it played well but buffers a lot. I'm already aware of how to deal with the buffer problem. All other none 3D played just fine with cup between 30-70 which is fine.

3 - Using the bluetooth head phone in kodi when playing movies was acceptable but had some freezes not very often. Audio sync was very acceptable.

4 - Using the bluetooth head phone when watching hd tv is not good at all because both CPUs run 100%. I think the HDTV aspect needs some optimization I guess.

Thanks.

[ChristianTroy]

Cpu usage should be within 50-70% on both cores (don't use the "o" osd because it will increase cpu usage to update the stats but use "htop" command from an adb prompt or from the serial console) on high bitrate (12/15 Mb/s) hd channels, unless you use the "real 1080p output".
There was a problem in 14.1 where amcodec was not used even if it was selected and you had to toggle off/on amcodec from settings.

root@m0:/ # dumpsys cpuinfo                                                                                                                                                                         
Load: 2.02 / 2.15 / 1.82
CPU usage from 76244ms to 16242ms ago:
  42% 4374/org.xbmc.kodi: 20% user + 21% kernel / faults: 16967 minor
  41% 3544/tvheadend: 33% user + 8% kernel / faults: 1385 minor
  13% 2631/surfaceflinger: 5.8% user + 8% kernel

[cut]

[B]60% TOTAL[/B]: 33% user + 23% kernel + 0% iowait + 4% softirq

Bluetooth skips is caused by interferences or a not fully compatible set, with that cheap one I posted the link I have no issue on any channel / video.

[ChristianTroy]

Kodi 14.2rc1 WeTek_mod_v1

Tvheadend with DVBCSA (should be more efficient handling encrypted channels on ARM, tests are welcome, I'm trying it since yesterday and have no problems so far.)

[adoga]

Kodi 14.2rc1 WeTek_mod_v1

Tvheadend with DVBCSA (should be more efficient handling encrypted channels on ARM, tests are welcome, I'm trying it since yesterday and have no problems so far.)

1 - can I still use OSCAM if this library is installed?

2 - what are the new features of this kodi?

There are some things I found out yesterday that aren't working well.

1 - Holding down the power button for about 2 seconds brings up the shutdown menu. If I select "Power off" the system crashes. I actually waited for more than 10 minutes and no activity whatsoever so I had to unplug it. Plugging it again started the system.

Honestly this i weird, wetek created a great box but does not understand the concept of standby/power off. Those are the basic things a box should have. I have been unplugging and plugging the whole yesterday.

2 - Some apps don't work well. TED Talks works but if I change the quality to HD then it goes crazy like repeated "Play/Stop". Once set for a particular video, you cannot turn it off, it always happen for the video.

[adoga]

I have been using my headset on all my android boxes but most of them are more powerful than the Wetek Play. It might be its not powerful enough.

Here is a link to my headset

[ChristianTroy]

1 - can I still use OSCAM if this library is installed?

2 - what are the new features of this kodi?

There are some things I found out yesterday that aren't working well.

1 - Holding down the power button for about 2 seconds brings up the shutdown menu. If I select "Power off" the system crashes. I actually waited for more than 10 minutes and no activity whatsoever so I had to unplug it. Plugging it again started the system.

Honestly this i weird, wetek created a great box but does not understand the concept of standby/power off. Those are the basic things a box should have. I have been unplugging and plugging the whole yesterday.

2 - Some apps don't work well. TED Talks works but if I change the quality to HD then it goes crazy like repeated "Play/Stop". Once set for a particular video, you cannot turn it off, it always happen for the video.

1. Sure, nothing regarding oscam will change

2. https://github.com/christiantroy/xbm...x-WeTek_mod_v1

-----

1. It's not crashing, it's the wanted behavior. That is the *real* power off (for example if you wanna unplug it from ac, move it somewhere, etc.) and since this device doesn't have a PMU it just stops and hangs (like older PCs that didn't have APM/ACPI and at Windows 95 times you were prompted with "You can turn off your computer now", or something like that, I'm translating to english something I had only seen in Italian :P )

Stock behavior from amlogic source was to reboot the machine. WeTek OS will, instead, call the suspend method. But if you follow the thread on wetekforums you'll see I changed the suspension because it was frustrating (to me) having to wait ~1 minute every time I had to turn on the device.

Just put it in standby with single press of remote power button or the one on the box itself. If you want the other behavior you have to go to WeTek OS, I will always use this different method, it has more pros (like if you schedule a recording, you won't miss it. TVH is not meant to be used with Android and has no java bindings to set up an alarm using AlarmManager)


2. Such apps will probably use OMX libraries and Amlogic's OMX support actually is... meh they added it with KitKat (after 3/4 years it was introduced by Google ) but they have to improve it a lot, anyway post a logcat and I will give you a look (btw their OMX libraries are not open source, just precompiled stuff, so it's off limits, if it's that... it's what it is)

[ChristianTroy]

Regarding the suspension, a quote from wetekforums

Guys I've been trying a new suspension method, it's a better solution IMHO.

I'm going to use Android's capabilities to prevent the device from entering suspension (with wakelocks) to only let the kernel turn off everything but without really entering suspension, something like flashing the "wetek-disable-shutdown.zip" that you find in the second post of all my other rom's threads.

But I did a modification in the kernel: it will turn the power led blue/red if the display is on/off so you'll know if you actually turned it off. I decided to mantain on the eventually enabled wifi or eth led so you'll see if you have connection or not.

This thing is very useful if you're going to program a recording in tvheadend, otherwise the device won't wake from sleep (at least not with easy work without using Android's AlarmManager to create a new wake up task) and in this way the device won't have to perform boot from scratch once you put it to sleep, but it will be instantly on again.
It will consume a little bit more of power though (haven't run much tests but since this device when it's on runs at 7w, I guess it will be <5w) but I think that many of you keep it running all the time, in this way it's like if it was running but just with the output turned off

It's triggered only by the pression of power button (on remote or on the box), the only difference is that the device doesn't reach that state similar to the suspend-to-disk of a PC where it requires a full boot to come back to life.
If you don't press the power button the device will keep running, like it was already doing. Right now it is more similar to a tablet / phone, it will receive notifications while it's turned off because it's not really turned off, only video output related stuff is off but the system is alive, in fact you can use it to feed another box from the network, you can ping it, keep using adb over network, etc.

edit: from wetekforums

Tracked down the memory leak which was spamming the dmesg output - seems it's the eminence skin, shame as I love that skin.

it looks like there's a problem with Eminence, at least on OE, but it's worth a try here as well that if I'm not mistaken it's what you're using and maybe the high cpu usage and bt stuttering you're experiencing (and I'm not) might be caused by the skin.

[adoga]

My suggestion would have been to put the device into shutdown state like the stock firmware does using the Power off menu. And on the remote control, pressing the power button should bring it to standby - your method. Can't both be achieved this way?

[adoga]

I really love the skin. I will try confluence to see if the cpu usage is better. I don't have problem with it on OE because cpu is not much when on HDTV. I will continue to use it on OE though.

Thanks for the info.

[adoga]

Does your Kodi rc1 have the bt hack built in?

[ChristianTroy]

No I don't like that hack so don't include it in the main build. Look I will hide power off from power menu so nobody will be tempted to use it [emoji14]
I have 60% CPU usage on 15mb/s HD channel. If anyone has more there's a problem with the configuration...