 So we here the Lunaro Connect Budapest, and who are you? Hi, I'm Kunko, I work in the automation and CI part of Lunaro. So automation and CI, what is that? We do the builds for all the things we release, like the Debian and Open Embedded, and we also do the integrated testing with Lava or other things. And here's some 96 boards, what do you think about those? They're a nice form factor, but I'm more interested in how it will be in a few months for now, because there is a movement to write FIFA L2 drivers for all the media accelerators. One of my hobby projects is working on Kodi, the media sender application. And currently it's really hard to get it working on ARM, because every SOC vendor has their own library, there's no standard interface on regular Linux. There's one on Android, but not on regular Linux. And finally, people are moving towards FIFA L2. What do you call it, 3-4-2-2? FIFA L2 Video for Linux 2. It has been in the kernel for a long time, but they're now extending it to end code and decode support for 8264, VP9 and things like that. So you can get the hardware accelerated decoding and rendering and scaling through a standard interface. So you don't have to write SOC specific code anymore. So one of the differentiators, some of the SOC vendors had good video playback, right? Yes. Like Amlogic is pretty good, but lots of them have pretty good stuff. But how's it going to be better now? It's, well, it will be the same hardware. So for a user there won't be any use of visible change, but for example on applications like Kodi it doesn't have to write different versions, because Kodi has a specific AMlogic code and now Rockchip wants to add Rockchip specific code. And that should all go away and it will have standard FIFA L2 code. You just talk to ffmpeg and it just works. So you've been looking at the Amlogic S905, the 905X, the Xiaomi Mi Box. I have the Mi Box with Android TV. What do you think about those? I love them. I have two S905 boxes and one Xbox and they're cheap and they work well. So that's what I use for my main Kodi usage when I watch movies or TV shows in my house. So I'm very much a fan of that. But how's that going to get better? What I would like... Because you say the video for Linux 2, right? Yes. So that wouldn't change thing. But for example if I would get a Dragon Board 820 that has better hardware specs, it has for example gigabit ethernet and 905X only has 100 megabit, I would like to use that. And right now I can run Kodi on it, but Kodi cannot use the hardware acceleration. So it will all be CPU decode. So 1080p works but 4K won't. So all these boards are maybe going to have very good hardware accelerated media playback? Yes. So for example, HighSilicon is working on the FIFA L2 driver. I don't know how far along is it, but I know they're working on it. So it would be nice if you can just use a high key or a Dragon Board 410C to do 1080p hardware decoding Kodi. Because it's a really nice small form factor. And 4K maybe? On all the current boards there is a maximum of HDMI 1.4 and they max out at 1080p. So they can't even do the 4K at 24 frames. So sadly the hardware might be able to decode it, but you can't put it on the screen. And making a driver like this, what kind of work goes into that? And where does it go on SOC? Is it running on the ARM CPU or somewhere else? It's like a GPU because it's a separate hardware block that you program. Some might need firmware, for example TI, you needed a lot of firmware to drive it. And I think AMlogic, you don't really need firmware, you just talk to the hardware, you set up some registers. So it depends on the chip vendor how much work it is. But it will be a Linux kernel interface, so you just open the FIFA L node, query its capabilities and then just push your video in. Is Lignaro doing some stuff with that to make this happen? Yes, the Lignaro home group is very interested in this because if you want to have a reference TV platform, you need to have a reference library and you can do it with an SOC vendor library, but if you want to make a generic FIFA L2 is the answer. And that's free, that's open source driver for video, decode, not encode. Encode as well. That goes into the same framework. This is a hobby project for me, so I don't have a good view of what the home group is doing. They work on decode because they work on set up boxes. And what's the main difference in your view 905 and 905X? So the 905X was optimized to be as cheap as possible, two-layer PCB, network Mac and Fi integrated, tuned for specific EMMC. So your bomb cost is very low. It was made to be very, very cheap. So it cuts some corners for 8264 decode, the 905X is better, but 905X gets you VP9. So what do you want? If you want to get a bit of Ethernet, 905X is not the answer, but it's just so incredibly cheap you can't really beat that. And that's providing for some amazing set up boxes where the bomb cost is below $30. And this is what the Xiaomi box 3 is based on that. The retail price is below $30, so the bomb has to be below $10. And that's including plastic for the tooling for the case. That's crazy. It really is crazy. That's why most of those boxes look the same because they use the same plastic tooling, but you don't really care. It's a small rectangle you hide beneath your tithy, done. But you removed the Android TV UI. You don't like that? What do you like? I don't like Android and I bought one of the cheap boxes, so I got a vendor build with all the piracy add-ons installed, and I don't trust my data to that. So I reflashed it with LibreAlec, so that runs just Linux and Codi, and I'm really happy with that. What is this LibreAlec? LibreAlec is a fork of OpenAlec that might, that name might ring a bell, and their tag line is just enough operating system for Codi. So it's a really minimalistic install. It just has just enough Linux to run Codi. So you download the SD card image, you put it in the SD card, you put it in, and it boots up and within a few seconds you have Codi running. And then it can take over the, how do you take over the Xiaomi Android TV box for that? So they have a lively community, but for example, WeTech is sponsoring work, so they have an official WeTech build for the 905 things. Solid Run has an official build for IMX6 and our community build. So for your Xiaomi box, you would take a community build, put it on an SD card, and I think the only thing you need to do is find a toothpick to push the reset button when you insert the SD card, but you only have to do it once, and then it works in parallel to Android TV. If you remove the SD card, it will boot Android again, so it's non-destructive. So it's okay that it's on an SD card, it doesn't take too long to load the first time? Pretty fast. It's pretty fast. Like how many, how long? My box, when I used an SD card from power to Codi, it was like 15 seconds or so. You can do it fast for an EMMC, but it's very fast. That's it, you just load from an SD card, you don't need to remove Android TV. No, you don't. But Codi UI, is that good enough, or isn't it like a little bit basic? Could they do something to make it nicer? They recently, in the release that they released, what is it, two weeks ago, they switched to a new GUI, which fixes another few things, but I'm still getting used to it, because I used the old GUI for years and years, so it's a big change. I'm still not sure if I'm happy about it, but I'm giving it a good try. So they are receptive for GUI issues, and it has improved a lot. For example, the YouTube plugin now can give you a title view with little thumbnails for the pictures like you would have on the website, instead of a long text list. So that's a big improvement for me. But you can't use voice search and stuff like that. No. It's just, they call it add-ons, right? Yeah. And add-ons are awesome? It depends. The official add-ons work quite well. For example, the YouTube plugin, it works quite well, but since it is community, you have to go to Google, get your own API key, and you have to do a lot of work to get signed in to YouTube, not like on your TV or media box, where you just type in your Google credentials and you get your history and subscription, you have to do a bit more work. That's not a problem for me, but it gets for the regular user that that might be an issue. And what are those fully loaded coding boxes? Those are highly illegal. What's wrong with them? They ship. An add-on pre-installed, that's it? Multiple add-ons. And most of those add-ons link to web servers that restream things without a subscription or link to a so-called card-sharing website. So for cable TV, you usually need a smart card to decode things. And they have software that lets you share the card over the network. So only one person has the card and subscription and thousands of people will stream it. So the Codi people are not happy with that because they would like to be associated with media center and not ramping piracy. Yeah, for sure. But how did it get all this bandwidth to serve so many people streaming stuff? How does that work? I don't know. I've never used one of those streaming servers, but I guess the cloud is cheap. It's cheap enough so this can be thousands of people watching stuff for free. Well for free and they also have subscription models, so you can subscribe to a piracy service for, let's say, a dollar a month. And for a dollar a month, you can buy a lot of EC2 or Google Cloud instances. So that's on the Codi and Codi is just going to be the king forever, do you think, or that's the way to do media? I don't know. They do one thing really well. They have invested in good audio and video sync so that if you play a movie, it looks good. No frame drops and tearing and things like that, so they make an effort for that. For 24p, I'm really sensitive to judder. So when I go to a TV store and they have a demo movie, just like someone scraping over my retina when you have judder. So I'm really happy that the 905X can do true 24p and my TV as well, so that makes watching Blu-ray rips really good. So 905X is perfect for Codi. Yes. Do you need more performance for Codi? No. There's no need for more because it does 4K, it does H.265, VP9, 4K, you don't want 8K, so basically, but the UI could be faster with the fastest CPU or not? Or better GPU. The 905X has a relatively slow Mali, so that could use some improvement. But what I do now, I run the GUI at 1080p and for 4K video it will just go to 4K for just a video and that works well enough. And how about if you want to run a desktop computer, 905X is not enough performance, right? No. For sure not. No. What's not fast enough about it? It uses the Cortex A53, which is not the Fossus ARM V8 core. It's a tiny, tiny chip. It's a tiny chip and the memory bandwidth is not that much in it. You get two gigs of RAM and for a Linux desktop you really want more. So what would you recommend for minimum desktop configuration? I don't know. It depends on what you want to do. Is it one of the chips in these? Is one of these fast enough or you want faster? I want faster. I think personally if I were able to pick I would try to do the chip on the Dragon Board A20 because that has a faster GPU, more memory bandwidth and I think it even has PCIe but I'm not entirely sure. It has SATA for faster connects, so that would be a good candidate to do. I think the GPU driver is open, which is a big plus. For Adreno, but it's a cryo core. That's fine. I think so. Cryo, you don't need the ARM Cortex A73, that would be nice also, right? That would be nice. Cool. But you can't have everything because the perfect chip would be expensive. Just look at the Cavium chip. You get 96 cores. That is really fast but it's like really expensive. Do you have a Chromebook? I have one of the old Samsung Chromebooks. I think what is it? The snow? That's not your main computer, right? No. But there's some talk that hopefully soon all the Linaro engineers are going to be able to have ARM laptops. Is that going to happen or is just people talking? I don't know. Not every engineer wants the same. For me, my laptop is just a way to SSH into a server so that I don't care that much. The Chromebook snow would have been enough if it would have a better trackpad. I really love Apple trackpads. The way the glass is smooth enough that I hate other trackpads. So I stick with my Apple laptop unless I get a good trackpad. Some people do compilation on their laptops and then you would need a lot of RAM. 16GB or 32GB. Cool. But that's supported with 64-bit ARM. 64-bit ARM has a 64-bit address space but for example the 905X memory controller I think maxes out at 2GB. So it depends? It depends. In theory it works but if you want to have a cheap chip you can just put in a smaller memory controller and then you've lost. Cool. So that's awesome. Looking forward to some improvements happening here with the 96 boards and everything else happening at Linaro with the video community. So hopefully I can interview some of the guys doing the home group. Yep. Thanks. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye