Blind55

Just as an update, for anyone who cares. The above setup worked well, but I couldn't help but attempting to get video hardware acceleration in a browser. Since my post above, Armbian support for the Nanopi R6S went platinum (thanks to @Efe Çetin), kernel 7 came out and mesa 26 should provide all that is needed for vaapi/v4l2 support in firefox. Unfortunately, minimal Armbian Debian with kernel 7 combined with mesa 26 looks to be some time away - that would allow me to run sway, and likely with firefox using video decode acceleration. OTOH, vendor kernel at 6.1 doesn't seem to allow sway to run at all. So I tried Armbian Debian 13 minimal with kernel 6.18, which runs sway just fine, but the mesa version is stuck at 25.2 which in the standard Debian package does not by default support the rockchip hardware yet, I think. In addition, there seems to be some incompatibility with the repository provided here (or I am doing something wrong, which I wouldn't deny). Fortunately, looking at the Armbian git files I saw that the standard Armbian Ubuntu Noble with vendor 6.1 and Gnome (KDE version doesn't run well) appears to a) work fine with wayland, and b) automatically uses the Amazingfate (liujianfeng1994) PPA. This provides chromium with video hardware decode support, and I can still set up jellyfin. So at this point, without having to compile everything myself from scratch, this is the best setup from my perspective. Shout out to @Efe Çetin for making it this convenient - which it truly is, even though Gnome isn't my preferred DM.

Ok, as promised with a report. Current setup - NanoPi R6S - Armbian Debian trixie minimal edition, with Kernel 6.1.115 - LXQT (using X11) - Jellyfin (installed via Jellyfin website instructions, NOT using armbian-config as that sets up docker and then makes it more opaque to run it with external media) - firefox Results - Jellyfin, accessed via apps for various SmartTVs (Google Chromecast, Amazon TV, etc), runs super smooth with 4K videos, indicating functioning hardware decoding. NanoPi stays very cool even for 4K transcodes. - Firefox video playback has to, like @eselarm already said, resort to software decode. NanoPi is able to play smooth up to HD level videos in firefox, but it gets pretty hot. Comments I suppose that getting firefox hardware accelerated video decode is further out of reach now that ffmpeg has DMCA-taken-down the rockchip-mpp github repository...but what do I know. I am wondering if running LXQT with wayland would offer improvements, but I am not sure it's worth the effort. I am a relatively happy camper with this setup.

@eselarm Thank you very much for the details. I am currently working with the NanoPi R6S minimal image, with kernel 6.1 based on your feedback. I started out with the rolling release version, but that cannot run Jellyfin (because it is Forky). So I going back to the Trixie version and test this now. I will report back here whether the Jellyfin server works well with the transcoding of 4K movies (like the vendor FriendlyElec distribution does) and whether 4K movie playing can be smooth on it.

@eselarm, thank you for your thoughts. So, just for clarification: for the Jellyfin server, do you use the FriendlyElec (the vendor distro)? Or one of the 6.1 Armbian images? With the Ubuntu rolling release I can stream in a browser with software decoding ok (although I am not getting sound rn). I will work some more on it and report back.

Update 1. The LibreElec solution that Dante suggested works very well, if the only thing that is wanted is the video acceleration and kodi. Unfortunately, if one wanted to also add a Jellyfin server on the Nanopi R6S (which works well with video acceleration), then LibreElec is an issue because it won't allow installing that software. Nonetheless, right now, it appears to be the only option besides FriendlyElec. 2. The Armbian solution does not allow for stutterless playback of 2160 videos for some reason. Please see the logs below: https://paste.armbian.com/akudoyopas In general, I would much prefer a solution with Armbian which would allow a lot more flexibility with my setup.

Thank you, everyone, for the suggestions. After having been absent here for a while, I am going to try Dante's suggestion first. Thanks again!

I have been pulling my hair out trying to get the acceleration performance (smooth 4K video playback in mpv / chromium) in Armbian (any of the MESA/VPU marked releases) that I am getting from the FriendlyElec distributions. In my naive mind, I thought the MESA/VPU version would get me there, but mpv stutters on 4K videos. I suspect this is because Armbian avoids the proprietary drives. A long time ago, Armbian Ubuntu versions were able to be 'amended' with the Amazingfate/liujianfeng1994 repository, but I have not been able to make that work in a while. Could someone point me to a guide that allows me to get similar performance with Armbian as I am getting with FriendlyElec? Thanks bunch in advance!

That is awesome, thank you very much! I have been getting decent results with the legacy Jammy minimal CLI image and liujianfeng1994 repository for GPU hardware acceleration. Recently, though, the chromium-browser and libwidevinecdm with the liujianfeng1994 repository do not seem to work well, I always have to remove all created chromium browser directories in the .config/ and .cache/ subdirectories for chromium-browser to start at all. Long story short, is there anything I can do to support any- I can only imagine tedious - effort to bring the mali mesa & ffmpeg libraries to the rolling release (if such a thing exists at all) ?