I just this evening side-loaded Kodi 16.1 onto my new Fire TV box and I gotta say, I’m impressed. I ran a whole lot of playback tests for all kind of different videos, and for the most part, and with only some small issues, Kodi 16.1 on the Fire TV box, gen2, works surprisingly well. (My compliments to all of the revelant developers. A job well done.)
That having been said, I did find a couple of issues.
Firstly, and rather oddly, it seems that when I use Kodi on the Fire TV box to try to watch some of my ISO SD DVD rips, everything works beautifully, and the video looks wonderful. But in this case, it appears that Kodi is not attempting to use any HW acceleration, and is just decoding the video using ff-mpeg2video. That’s fine by me! This box apparently has well more than enough CPU horsepower to do the decode entirely with the CPU, and as I say, that works just fine. The problem arises when I take some hunk of stuff that I have sliced out of an SD DVD rip… some MPEG2 material that I’ve put into an MPEG-PS container and given a .mpg filename suffix to. In these cases, it appears that Kodi is using amc-mpeg2 HW acceleration, and the result looks awful… very very poor quality deinterlacing is evident.
I gather that this is a known problem, and I guess that I should be “blacklisting” the HW acceleration for MPEG2, using something along the lines of the advancedsetting.xml file as suggested here:
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=…pid1966560
Is that correct? Am I on the Right Track here? And if so, can the example advancedsetting.xml file given at the above URL be made any simpler, or shorter, for my specific case? I mean really, its only SD MPEG2 that’s the problem. (I just don’t want to mess with the other codecs or with the choice of which codecs will be used for any HD material.)
The only other glitch I saw while testing Kodi 16.1 on the Fire TV box was that when I tried to skip forward (using the UP button on my remote) while playing a rip of the (MPEG4) Saving Private Ryan Blu-ray… over my fast local network… I managed to lock up Kodi. It got real confused, displayed a static and semi-trashed frame from the movie on the screen, but otherwise became rather dead & unresponsive until I hit STOP on the remote. (The decoder being used appeared to be amc-h264, which is to be expected, I guess.) I should note that with other lower-bandwidth MPEG4 videos, as well as various WMV1/WMV2/WMV3/VC1 videos I experienced no problems at all. And unexpectedly, I also had no problem at all playing my rip of the Doctor Zhivago Blu-Ray, which is high-bandwidth and coded with VC-1. (This was deccoded without any HW acceleration on the Fire TV, since there isn’t any available acceleration hardware for VC-1 on the FireTV’s SoC, but apparently the Gen2 FireTV box has enough CPU cajones to be able to do the decode all in software on the CPU, even for this high-bandwidth 1080p VC1 material, which is impressive.)