Video, Licensing and Screen Turns Off

simpz

I have been playing with Emteria OS and it's very good piece of work, certainly easy to bring up a working Android on a rpi. But I have a few questions.

1/ I have tried playing video on VLC with EmteriaOS and it doesn't display the video but I hear the sound.
Do I need to buy and put in place raspberry pi licence keys for the GPU hardware to make this work? e.g in config.txt

decode_MPG2=0x91e1d011
decode_WVC1=0xf312f131

Do I need these to do video and will Emteria use the HW accelerated decoder if I do?

2/ I'm looking to buy a license. The "Basic" one in features says:
"Update notifications"

Whereas "Customized" says:

"Automatic updates"

Does this mean Basic will never get updates without having to pull the sdcard (and lose all config) and re-flash?
When is in place updating due? Don't really want to keep taking my display case to pieces to update software.

3/ I was thinking of leaving the screen on all the time, but this doesn't seem to be an option on the Android settings (upto 10 minutes as I remember). Any reason for this? Also if you select the screensaver it never seems to cut in after the set interval, just goes black.

IKS

Thanks for your feedback. There is still a long way to go :smile:
To answer your questions:

1) I'll be honest, we didn't test it yet. We were told that the software rendering works (if you activate it somewhere in the settings), so we didn't try anything else. If you have a specific use case for a large number of devices, please contact us directly and we will discuss what is possible.

2) Automatic updates is the next big feature we will release. I am pretty sure, that everyone with a valid license will be able to use it. Since this feature isn't there yet, we didn't want to lie in the product features (notifications are already included). The "customized" version rather describes what is generally possible, even if its not implemented yet. There is no guaranteed OTA for in-place updates. I hope we will finish it in several weeks.

3) All of our devices stay on by default. If you are using an official RPi3 screen, then it probably automatically dimmed to save the battery. It can be reactivated by touching it. The display itself shouldn't be turned off completely. This is standard behavior of Android on all mobile devices. However, we have just released a new version, where we had to change the dimming logic a little bit in order to support older touchscreens (revision 1.0). In this version the screen stays relatively bright all the time.

simpz

@IKS said:
Thanks for your feedback. There is still a long way to go :smile:
To answer your questions:

1) I'll be honest, we didn't test it yet. We were told that the software rendering works (if you activate it somewhere in the settings), so we didn't try anything else. If you have a specific use case for a large number of devices, please contact us directly and we will discuss what is possible.

I'll try a different video player and see how I get on, and not try the HW rendered just now. Sadly I'm just working on a little project of my own......

2) Automatic updates is the next big feature we will release. I am pretty sure, that everyone with a valid license will be able to use it. Since this feature isn't there yet, we didn't want to lie in the product features (notifications are already included). The "customized" version rather describes what is generally possible, even if its not implemented yet. There is no guaranteed OTA for in-place updates. I hope we will finish it in several weeks.

Sounds good.

3) All of our devices stay on by default. If you are using an official RPi3 screen, then it probably automatically dimmed to save the battery. It can be reactivated by touching it. The display itself shouldn't be turned off completely. This is standard behavior of Android on all mobile devices. However, we have just released a new version, where we had to change the dimming logic a little bit in order to support older touchscreens (revision 1.0). In this version the screen stays relatively bright all the time.

Interesting, It is the official Raspberry Pi 7 inch screen I'm using. I didn't know the screen dimmed on it's own. I'm wonder if it's possible to tell it not to do this? Or if that is an unwise thing to do?