jock

@haven did you just try a different TV/monitor to see if the missing audio persists? In my case I tested and checked I have HDMI audio working even with u-boot video output enabled.

You're welcome in supporting the armbian project if you want and if you can. 😉

@haven just had the chance to check with Debian Bookworm with no DE at all, bare terminal. In my case, on my IIyama monitor, I have no issues at all with HDMI sound. It works on kernel 6.6.60 (latest 6.6 release so far), double checked on older 5.19 kernel and it works the same way. Perhaps the issue is more software related with pulseaudio/xfce rather than related to bare hardware? As a side note, I only have a very loud default volume, since there is no volume control and so I get 100% volume. Turning down volume configuring alsa with "softvol" plugin (following this) fixes the loud volume and HDMI audio works fine in bare terminal for me.

@Ioan Bogdan Veringioiu thanks a lot for testing and finding this bug. Since that patch was more an inheritance rather than a real necessity, I will remove it or cut to the very minimal pieces needed soon. Thanks again! edit: Pull request opened: https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/7479 the patch will be removed soon from mainline.

It could be that it is not working anymore since I upgraded to 2024.04 u-boot and had to practically rebuild the configuration from scratch. This is indeed not intended and has to be considered as a regression.

I vaguely remember that it was inherited from somewhere when I merged rockchip 32 bit families (there was a separate family for rk322x). It is actually an adaptation from a kernel submitted patch from a rockchip person: https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-rockchip/patch/1569553244-3165-2-git-send-email-zhangqing@rock-chips.com/, but it actually never went into the mainline kernel.

Weird that 800x480@65Hz works despite the invalid rate warning, and 800x480@66Hz does not produce any warning but does not work at all. By the way, the only "major" difference is the negative VSync for the native 800x480 mode. You may want to compare those modelines against the kernel 4.4 to look for differences. Perhaps there are some "restrictions" in the modeline on armbian kernel 6.6 that force the display with a vertical refresh rate (65.7 Hz) that is not supported by the display. Did you try also to force display vertical refresh rate to 60Hz and 66Hz via kernel command line?

@Minoro Hamada Supposing you removed the sdcard from the slot, the only way to tell you what is happening is providing logs from the serial interface. You may have a broken/read only eMMC. Also you did not specify what image, what kernel, what board you have...

No, this is not expected at all. Unless there is a problem that may freeze the board at boot (like the optee issue that is coming up recently), when armbian is installed, boot priority is given to sdcard, then eMMC. @Mr-TNT I guess you did not follow the instructions to first erase eMMC and test armbian on sdcard and later install into eMMC.

Here: https://users.armbian.com/jock/rk3288/ I repackaged the libreelec patches, there was a very small change in a device tree and I don't know if it could be of any importance. You can try rockchip-6.6 and/or rockchip-6.11 debs for your setup. You need to install linux-dtb and linux-image packages for sure, linux-headers is only needed if you have kernel modules built by yourself. Also you may also want to try to force the HDMI resolution adding extraargs=video=HDMI-A-1:800x480@60D to /boot/armbianEnv.txt and see if you get a framebuffer

It could even be that I should re-align the libreelec patches in armbian... for some time those were not actively developed in the libreelec project, and thus I did some bare fixes to keep them compatible with newer kernels, but they could have been broken somewhere in the middle. I will try to give a shot in the weekend, but I'm sorry I can't promise actual results

I may guess that the HDMI timings in the kernel driver for HDMI are not suitable for uncommon resolutions like 800x480 is. I borrowed the actual timing from LibreELEC project which, in turn, were elaborated from other informed persons, and those timing greatly improved compatibility among regular monitors and TVs around, but indeed they could have broken uncommon resolutions. This is the patch which, among other things, modifies the existing HDMI timings. I could try to compile and image without that patch to see if works for you, but remember that you won't be able to upgrade the kernel, otherwise it would break again

@robertoj I may guess there are some missing pieces in the armbian kernel for allwinner: for rockchip, there are some patches borrowed from libreelec to make it work correctly with all formats. I don't know what is the status for allwinner and if there are similar patches and fixes that are not include right now, you won't be able to get anything. ffmpeg with v4l2request patches applied should work with any device which has a working v4l2request compliant drivers in the kernel, plus it also requires a properly working presentation framework for the DRM/DRMPrime and EGL parts, so there are several players involved: ffmpeg has to talk via v4l2-request to the kernel, the hardware decoding happens in the V4L2 drivers, but the presentation on screen happens within the kernel (DRM) and/or Mesa (EGL/OpenGL), bridged by DRMPRIME buffer sharing. I guess Mesa is pretty ok, since both Lima and Panfrost have the necessary bits in place to present things on screen, yet the Cedrus hardware decoder driver has to properly support hardware decoding and buffer sharing via drmprime with the GPU driver. I made some simplifications here and omitted details, but as you see it is already a fairly complex communication setup, of which ffmpeg is just the "user" of all those other services.

@Ioan Bogdan Veringioiu hello, did you try any older image wth mainline kernel that was working for you, or just tried debian buster with kernel 6.6 and it just does not work? HDMI compatibility is very hard to achieve, and fixing you problem may became very difficult.

@robertoj well a 240p video is easy enough even for H3 without hardware decoding. The repository is intended for hardware decoding, and my tests were done with 720p30 h.264 and 1080p30 h.265 videos