Release 1.8.4 with Wayland fixes

[yol]

Hi,

in the next few months we would like to release Kodi with native Wayland support. libva-1 is sadly broken on Wayland in all currently available public releases as the only release that includes fixes is 2.0.0. Realistically though, we cannot expect all current distributions to immediately jump to libva-2 as it would lead to recompilation of lots of packages because of the API/ABI changes - so we cannot depend on libva-2 in Kodi.

Instead, it would be nice to have the following patches applied in a public release of the libva-1 series (they should all apply cleanly to 1.8.3 I think) so we could depend on that:

• https://github.com/01org/libva/pull/98
• https://github.com/01org/libva/pull/65
• https://github.com/01org/libva/pull/67
• https://github.com/01org/libva/pull/66

The first two are absolutely necessary, the other two are nice-to-have. It really should not be a lot of work so I'm hoping for a positive reply :-) Feel free to ask if you need more information on the issues we're facing.

cc @wsnipex

[yol]

Note: I guess the API version would have to be bumped to 0.41 so we could detect the presence of the fixes.

[fritsch]

@xhaihao what's your opinion here. With e.g. Ubuntu running wayland by default, but still using vaapi 1.x I consider this a bugfix.

@chivakker what's your take on that?

[chivakker]

There's no plan to cut a 1.8.x release. IIUC, Ubuntu can handle these patches when they package vaapi which I guess would be 1.8.3.x

[yol]

There's no plan to cut a 1.8.x release. IIUC, Ubuntu can handle these patches when they package vaapi which I guess would be 1.8.3.x

The problem remains that we somehow have to detect if the libva version is recent enough, because older versions will cause problems/crashes so playback via libva needs to be disabled for them. If Ubuntu and/or other distributions (it's not only about Ubuntu after all) decide to patch 1.8.3, we still will not have any programmatic way to decide whether the libva available on the system is safe for usage with Wayland.

[wsnipex]

Not releasing a fixed 1.8.x version means most distros will have broken vaapi on wayland, which is quickly becoming the default windowing system.
This is not a really big problem for Kodi on ubuntu, since we can easily provide a patched packaged on our PPAs, but all other distros would have to do the same.

[xhaihao]

I merged all wayland fixes you mentioned into v1.8-branch and I will add a new tag for these fixes. Thx

[chivakker]

Before tagging I would like to have an analysis of other possibilities. Because the request is not just a tag but an actual bump on va version.

Can Kodi have an experimental flag where it plumbs everything to work on libva-2.0 and potentially carry a copy of libva-2.0 if distros are not ready?

[wsnipex]

Kodi already compiles and runs with libva 2.0. We could also add a copy of it, but it would be rather pointless in regard to distro packaging.
Most distros have a very strict policy to not allow bundled libs, so they will either
1.) patch it out
2.) not package or upgrade kodi

[yol]

@chivakker Having a copy of libva-2.0 would also mean that you have to bundle all the drivers (at the very least intel and mesa), which is really not how this is intended to work.

@xhaihao As @chivakker correctly pointed out, we would still need the va version (ideally both package and API) bumped.

[kwizart]

Having libva-intel-driver-1.8.4 was also mentioned at :
https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4724#c3

There would be an additional commit needed for backport into 1.8x branch
intel/intel-vaapi-driver@9d66570

Thx