Hi!
My appreciations for the latest Kodi 17 RC4 is release!
I grabbed the source code from git, compiled it and checked all the latest efforts in bug-fixing and improving this wonderful piece of software.
Thank you for your amazing work! 
I’m still using Kodi 17 03 beta (popcornmix), and I hope I won’t stick with it forever, because it’s the only build that suits my Raspberry Pi Linux environment and apart from the fact that the EPG database gets corrupted (fixed the potential destruction of my SdCard by moving it to a ramdrive) it has a really useful function that works also without giving too many privileges to the Kodi user – that’s the Custom Shutdown Timer.
Following I’ll try to enumerate and explain some issues/suggestions and hope that some will be taken care of before the Kodi 17 Krypton stable release will be finalized.
1. Some time ago I’ve struggled to get Kodi 17 03 compiled with static linking to the otherwise standard /opt/vc repository for some specific EGL/GLES/MMAL libraries.
The only way I managed to do this without breaking the ./configure script was to use the following environmental changes:
export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/opt/vc/include:/opt/vc/include/interface/vcos/pthreads
export CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH=/opt/vc/include:/opt/vc/include/interface/vcos/pthreads
export LDFLAGS=”-L/opt/vc/lib”
For reference, the whole discussion on this subject:
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=…pid2436871
However, something changed in the build script of Kodi starting from 17 06 beta and persisted up to the latest 17 RC4. Even if I specify the location for the libs with the commands from above the compilation script takes whatever EGL/GLES libs it finds on the system including the ones in /opt/vc and it looks like it prefers the ones in /usr/lib, as I couldn’t change the priority even by editing the ld.so.conf file and putting /opt/vc before /usr/lib.
Apart from Raspbian (and maybe very few other distros), other maintainers have just adapted their distros for Raspberry and the mesa libraries were not specifically compiled for Raspberry Pi (broadcom GPU acceleration), the normal/standard libEGL & libGLES libraries which are part of the libmesa package and used for the X Server too are installed in the default system libraries repository (/usr/lib in my case). When Kodi 17 06 -> RC4 starts it looks after these standard libraries in the /usr/lib and if it finds them it will load them and will crash with an Unable to create GUI error, error that is widespread throughout the Kodi forums. My only option is to remove the libmesa package and leave Kodi only with the libs available in /opt/vc, which are not even having the same name (no duplicates) as the standard libEGL & libGLESv2 ones:
ldd /usr/lib/kodi/kodi.bin | grep /opt/vc
libbrcmEGL.so => /opt/vc/lib/libbrcmEGL.so (0x76a85000)
libbrcmGLESv2.so => /opt/vc/lib/libbrcmGLESv2.so (0x76a60000)
I’d suggest to link Kodi statically to the libs in /opt/vc if the ./configure script gets the directive –with-platform=raspberry-pi2 and the libs are to be found in /opt/vc
Some hints:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4156…-libraries
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8471…ingle-host
2. Is there any possibility to change the custom shutdown timer into custom EXIT timer if the user with which Kodi is started has no shutdown privileges? Until Kodi 17 03 beta it worked, actually it was a bug that I’ve used as a feature. I don’t want to shutdown the computer I’m running Kodi on but only exit and let the Monitor/TV enter the sleep mode. Furthermore, this timer is a de facto feature on every Multimedia device (including ancient TV Sets) and its location in the Exit Menu is rather uninspired – one needs to simulate an Exit to reach it. I’d suggest to put it inside the contextual (the one immediately accessible while watching some content in Kodi) Options Menu.
My monologue on this:
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=298867
I’ve also tried the service.sleeptimer and I wasn’t really impressed by it, not to mention that to reach its settings page is even harder than to simulate an exit.
3. And a final suggestion. I really like the latest GUI/OSD modifications and would like to suggest to make the icons a little larger because from the distance they matter more than the text. The actual icons are still small and the tiles they stay on are huge in comparison.
Example (Categories):
https://i.imgur.com/q3ap4h5.jpg
The discussion:
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=…pid2469726
