Molski

This was many months ago, and Android isn't an option here. Even though I've used all of those through the fork into LineageOS. Has to be actual Linux for a few reasons. I got my Pi 5. So this isn't going to be doing anything video codec related, if anything at all.

It was a rather spontaneous purchase, partly because it was really cheap. But I was unaware of that. Seemed like other people had it working by doing some searching, so I just bought it. I did try Android, but I really just miss things like controlling Kodi with my TV remote. I'll probably just get something with Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc.. Or wait for the RPi 5. (With a laptop in its place until then.)

I spent a lot of time trying different distros, and all sorts of different things. H.264 was no problem, that definitely handles them properly. But with H.265. I've got to the point where the modules that seem to contain the H.265 support load, but throw experimental warnings all over. But they still usually either: don't work at all, or make the OS blow up. I just gave up after hundreds of hours, since my decade old RPi 3 seems to do the equivalent with a lot more stability. I'm just checking back every 6 months or so. Since I'm fairly sure this processor is capable of it. (But so far, that OPi4 LTS purchase was a complete waste for my purposes.)

I have owned numerous Raspberry Pi boards over the years, and I have always have ran Kodi on one of them. For years I have been wanting to upgrade my RPi 3 as it cannot play any of my H.265/HEVC videos. With all the shortages, and how old the Raspberry Pi 4 is getting, I made a rather spontaneous purchase for this Orange Pi 4 LTS board. Getting it all setup is easy enough, but of course, the video (even with H.264!) nearly maxes all 6 cores and the video is chunky as it's just doing everything without any video acceleration. Even navigating the menu seems slow and delayed. I have been scouring these forums and other sources for about 12 hours now, and I am still unsure which route to go. Just as a test, I ran Kodi as root and it was much smoother in the menu system and seemed to do H.264 (in software of course, so it was working really hard). But broke Pulseaudio, as Pulse is hardcoded to not accept connections from root when it's not setup as a system-wide service. Anyway, that's not an option. Kodi doesn't need to, and shouldn't run as root. I was very excited, then extremely let down when I found this post: A custom image with custom repositories? Plus, I don't want X11 or Wayland plus a window manager, I don't need it! Either way, it *seems* to be tied to a completely different chipset. I've been up all night working on this, and I am starting to go delirious, so any help would be appreciated.