drop omxplayer

[Rechi]

Motivation and Context

As mentioned at #13592 (comment) omxplayer can be removed for v19.

Types of change

• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
• Clean up (non-breaking change which removes non-working, unmaintained functionality)
• Improvement (non-breaking change which improves existing functionality)
• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
• Breaking change (fix or feature that will cause existing functionality to change)
• Cosmetic change (non-breaking change that doesn't touch code)
• None of the above (please explain below)

Checklist:

• My code follows the Code Guidelines of this project
• My change requires a change to the documentation, either Doxygen or wiki
• I have updated the documentation accordingly
• I have read the Contributing document
• I have added tests to cover my change
• All new and existing tests passed

[lrusak]

This is a great start to dropping the RPi platform as a whole! 😄 thank you! 👍

[pitsi]

Excuse my ignorance, but how will all those rpis work with libreelec/osmc/whatever without omxplayer?

[popcornmix]

@pitsi mmal has been the default and recommended player on Pi2 and Pi3 for a couple of years. That is still present.
Work is ongoing to use V4L2 and GBM on Pi2/Pi3 in the future, and that is hoped to be the solution for Kodi 19.
If you are on kodi 18, the nothing will change - that continues to have omxplayer as an option.

[pitsi]

I use libreelec 9.x on my 1st gen pi zero (not w), so I assume that kodi 18 will be the last one I can get :(
It was a gift for my nameday on 2016 :P
I also got a pi 3b+ recently and I installed libreelec 9.x too on it, but I gave it to a friend as a wedding gift, so I have to get a new one now.

[popcornmix]

Pi0/Pi1 are getting hard to support in newer versions of kodi with the limited CPU and RAM.
MMAL is usable on Pi0/Pi1 for simple video playback but tends to struggle with more advanced use (e.g. navigating gui when video is playing).

It is possible there will be downstream forks that support omxplayer in Kodi 19 for Pi0/Pi1, but I can't promise that - it depends on how far the player in kodi diverges from current state.

You will always be able to continue using Kodi 18 on your Pi0/Pi1 when Kodi 19 finally appears (based on time from 17->18 that may be over a year away).

[popcornmix]

Looks okay to me. A quick test and it compiled, and mmal playback still works.

[The-Exnor]

This is a great start to dropping the RPi platform as a whole! thank you!

Why? What is your problem with the Pi platform?

[MilhouseVH]

Why? What is your problem with the Pi platform?

It's the vendor specific/non-standard OMX/MMAL video decoding interfaces used by the RPi platform that are being dropped. This cleanup is happening on other platforms too, with non-standard decoding APIs replaced with standard decode APIs during Kodi 19 development. So fear not, the RPi hardware is not being dropped or abandoned, it will be changing to use modern standard and platform agnostic APIs so that Kodi 19 doesn't have to treat the RPi platform differently to Allwinner, Rockchip, Amlogic or any other ARM based device that uses a relatively modern/recent Linux kernel.