I'd also bet with certain types of displays (eg: OLED, HDR and/or local dimming) there's benefits when there's a different aspect ratio (eg 21:9), letting the TV do something different to the backlight when it knows there there is no content in parts of the display vs getting a black signal.
No thanks, modern TVs!
I’ve made my peace with software upscaling of video to match resolution/frame rate. At least the Apple TV does it pretty well. If you don’t you get a really annoying flicker as the display changes resolution. The shield on the other hand has really bad up scaling by comparison, particularly with frame rates so I just leave it on.
Far more important in my book is properly sending the raw audio out. I have a very expensive audio unit that will do a far better job upmixing the sound. Unfortunately the Apple TV doesn’t let me send the raw audio out.
Kodi can actually run third party apps, for what it's worth: https://kodi.tv/addons/matrix/
I used to launch Steam games in Big picture mode from Kodi just fine.
Actually I was waiting for a desktop environment like this Plasma Bigscreen for a while but then got a new TV with Android and use that instead.
I would still prefer to use Kodi as the main app launcher on Android but it gets Killed to save memory and takes a while to start up again.
And using Kodi over HDMI is not an option anymore since a lot of content I watch comes in 4K 10bit HDR or 4K Dolby Vision and sadly desktop Linux does not support HDR and variable refresh rate over HDMI (so Linux Steam experience also bad).
Everything is easy to drive via a TV remote.
The skin system lets you have as much UI eye candy as you like.
Chances are someone has made an addon for whatever you want to consume.
You're just running ye old HTPC otherwise.
The use case is the following. Consider one that has:
* 5.1 capable audio system
* A TVBox (KODI)
* A TV
* A projector
* The TV apps can play 5.1 content
* The TVBox (KODI) can play 5.1 content when connected to TV through HMDI (5.1 was agreed in the handshake between TV and TVBox)
* The TVBox __cannot play__ 5.1 content when connected to projector through HDMI because the projector is stereo audio only and there is no option to accept 5.1 content.
It does not bypass ALSA. It uses ALSA. It bypasses the original HDMI handshake and follows the user's wishes.
Of course it does not work in my case because a) that's the universe we live and b) it hits some android capability / security problem and it switches back to stereo output.
They run their own audio stack.
The other meaning of "ALSA" is libasound / asound.conf / dmix, the old userspace audio stack, which is deprecated since Pulseaudio except for a few holdout distros. ALSA had difficulty mixing multiple playback streams, let alone bitstreaming DTS. I think the GP is talking about this meaning.
That and bitbanging audio through GPIO or otherwise bypassing the ALSA stack doesn't seem all that unreasonable. I can't find any specific information about it with LibreElec/etc. but it would not surprise me.
Oh well. I think Pipewire has a lot of potential today. It brings much improvement to routing and session management for audio and the hybrid scheduler design and considerations for pro audio use cases makes it very promising. I hope the need to bypass the Linux audio stack can disappear.
On the contrary, that's super easy with ALSA. Literally all you need to do to "bitstream" is "play" the data as if it were audio, and not have any software in between trying to adjust volume or otherwise modify it. You could do it with nothing more complicated than "aplay", making sure to specify the correct card and not dmix.
At some point long before PulseAudio was ever a thing maybe but dmix with the default config has been working just fine all this time.
A Plasma skin can't do any of this. So while it's probably very suitable for things like games and photo frames on a big screen, I fear that it is disadvantaged from the start for video and audio.