Software support for video playback on Allwinner stick

I recently bought the Tronsmart Draco H3 TV stick (before I was aware of the reputation of Allwinner in this community Sad ), and I was vaguely aware that video playback might be a problem.

It came installed with that POC vidon XBMC, and multiple reasons, including the fact that I want to have a mysql db, I uninstalled that and installed Kodi proper from the app store. It works pretty well most of the time, but there are a few occasions when the video doesnt play (just the audio plays). I have a few questions about this. Hopefully a few of you resisted the impulse to ignore after reading Allwinner Tongue

1) Is Kodi playing all of the videos via software emulation/decoding? Or is there some amount of hardware decoding support present? I usually play sub 1080p video so I dont notice any impact in performance.

2) Is it possible to install software codecs or similar for a few of the formats which dont seem to work? One particular format is FLV (downloaded flash videos) Or is this a bug on Kodi? Or a format that was intentionally ignored?

3) One solution in such situations is using MXPlayer as an external player. I tried this once unsuccessfully, it is on my TODO list to try again, but I am curious, how does this work? If the APIs arent present, how is MXPlayer able to support hardware decoding? Did they have a special arrangement? Or reverse engineered? I realized this isnt the MXPlayer forum, I am just asking here in case someone knows.

4) Curious thing is that from before this stick, I have a Mele M9 TV box (which as luck would have it is also Allwinner). However this box seems to work well with atleast the FLV format and I have yet to find a format which doesnt work on it. Any idea why the behaviour is different?

Thanks for your time and patience if you got till here Smile