I have an Olinuxino A20. Armbian has no HDMI sound and the video playback is a bit painful.

This doesn't happen on Libreelec and, from my understanding, it's partly due to some kernel patches that they applied.

 

Is it possible to use Libreeleec's kernel on armbian? If so, can someone guide me a little on how to do it?

 

Thank you very much.

You could but video playback will be still painful. While audio interface is pretty standardized these days, video decoding is only getting there. Apps don't support video decoding on A20 yet, unless they are patched too. There is translation layer for VAAPI in works, but I'm not sure if it is useable in current state. LibreELEC serves as testing bed for video playback on Allwinner SoCs (at least for me) and environment is highly controlled to offer best experience possible. This means that playback is done through patched ffmpeg for video decoding and Kodi uses a render method not many apps use (DRM planes) and that only works well with full screen apps (GPU is not used at all).

I was planning on copying the ffmpeg and kodi binaries from LibreELEC. Shouldn't that help?

Otherwise I guess I'll just find a way to have them both installed and reboot whenever I want to use Kodi

18 hours ago, Daniel Sousa said:

I was planning on copying the ffmpeg and kodi binaries from LibreELEC. Shouldn't that help?

I don't know if that will work. LibreELEC uses latest versions of all libraries while Armbian not necessarily. Also be aware that Kodi in LibreELEC is meant to be run without X11 which means you have to drop into console first and then run Kodi.

Oh, that seems way harder than I was expecting. I think I'll try the dual boot idea, then

 

Thank you very much for your help!