Troy H

Unfortunately I never did find a solution. My orange pi 3 LTS has been sitting on a shelf until I can find another use for it. Best of luck finding something that works, and if you do please do share!

I've had an Orange Pi 3 LTS for a couple of months now. I bought it for use as a home theater tv box. I thought I'd use the official orange pi ubuntu release, but it turned out to be really outdated and broken. So I have been trying to get Armbian to work. After a lot of troubleshooting and time spent reading docs and forums, I can't get the thing to play video properly. It plays but is terrible quality and stutters constantly. I've determined that panfrost is working. In orangepi-config, under Hardware, it says the GPU is enabled. But when I run glmark2 I get a score of 100 or less no matter what I do. I've tried old builds of armbian for the pi 3 lts and they either wouldn't boot, don't have working wifi, or have the same video issue. I've tried running the build script myself but it has either failed or not produced a bootable build. I would love to learn more about Armbian and SBCs and actually get this thing to work for video, but it is incredibly overwhelming. Is this even worth my time to try to get working? I keep thinking there's just one setting I need to change, one driver I need to install, or something I'm missing, but I can't find it. Should I just buy a different board? If so, which one in a similar price range would actually do what I'm looking for? Thanks folks.

Here to report back.... I couldn't get anything to work. I tried a lot of things over a long time, and nothing. I've read through forum posts, I've tried running a custom build multiple times which either failed or wouldn't boot. I am feeling pretty hopeless about this board ever working for video with linux. I guess I'll just have to install the Android back onto it and live with that until I buy another board. I read somewhere that the orange pi 3b is a better version of the 3 LTS, and it looks to have more support everywhere. I guess I'll try that next. I don't know of any other boards in this price range that should be able to do 4k video.

Hi @gop3k I've been having the same issues on the Orange Pi 3 LTS. Video is really choppy and unwatchable, and I can't figure out why. I know it's possible to play video smoothly on this board because I can do so with the Android OS that came on the device. I actually reinstalled Android on an sd card (you have to use Allwinner's proprietary sd flashing tool) so I could actually use it for Kodi in the short term. But ideally I'd like to get Armbian working. I'm using a recent Armbian build for the Orange Pi 3 LTS: Armbian_community_24.8.0-trunk.495_Orangepi3-lts_noble_current_6.6.36_gnome_desktop I have done some research, which I'll outline below. I'm certain some of my understanding must be wrong, so take that for what it's worth. If someone is willing to correct me I'm happy to be corrected. I think that the gpu is not working properly in the most recent builds. I found that in older builds using Allwinner H6 chips that some people had to manually enable the GPU, but it looks like it is enabled but not working properly. The Allwinner H6 has a Mali-T720 MP2 GPU and Panfrost is the open source driver for it. I used the commands from here to make sure Panfrost is installed, enabled, and working. Which all seemed to be true in this build. But when I run glmark2 I get a score of around 85-100. Based on research this seems to be half of what the Allwinner H6 is capable of. Running armbian-config I see the option to enable hardware features, and as far as I know, this shows the different overlays you can enable in the device tree to tell the kernel about your hardware. These overlays are located in /boot/dts/allwinner/overlay/. A problem with the overlays is that many of them seem to be for the Allwinner H616 cpu. Which I know is just an updated version of the H6, but I'm wondering if that's causing problems. There is an option to enable the H616 gpu, which I turned on, then restarted. I still got the same 85-100 range of scores in glmark2. Could it be that Armbian is trying to use settings for the H616 instead of the H6 and that could be causing problems? I tried doing a custom build myself, which failed so I'll need to look into that if I want to try it again. But for now I'm going to try using an older automated build to see if that makes any difference. I'll respond again if I have anything to report.