[Armbian running on Pine64 (and other A64/H5 devices)]

i'm having problems with video playback after a not-so-recent (i think i did it in october) upgrade.

before that, all video would look normal, and most video would playback with only minimal framedrop.

 

now, most only display like this.
this is with mpv, and its output is something like this - looks ok to me???
but the problems are abundant with all video formats and media players (mplayer too, and i spent a good while playing with VLC's settings).

 

i tried:

 

downgrading kernel back to 3.10.105 version == downgrading packages linux*pine* to version 5.31.
it helped a little - i was able to watch a few very old & lo-res episodes.

 

then i found this: Video playing will break on sunxi legacy unless adding cma=96M to kernel boot parameter, so i undid the downgrade and added that option to /boot/boot.cmd & recompiled, after which i could see those 96M in 'dmesg|grep -i cma' (was 64M before).
but it did not help at all, the situation was just as bad as before the kernel downgrade!

 

what to do?

[Pinebook, Armbian Installed: Suspend on Lid Close?]

mate-power-manager indeed works better in this respect.
i had to manually add screen locking via systemd though (not sure if installing mate-screensaver would have fixed that too).

one thing that doesn't work is automatic 'sleep' after a given amount of inactivity.
right now, it does nothing (just blanks the screen) unless i trigger the suspend with one of 3 configured methods (lid, power button, sleep button).

xfce4-power-manager let me define a "Sleep Action" - maybe there's something similar going on here, but no GUI dialog to set it?

[Pinebook, Armbian Installed: Suspend on Lid Close?]

interesting.

does it use "mate-power-manager"?

what does 'systemd-inhibit' say?

[Pinebook, Armbian Installed: Suspend on Lid Close?]

i'm trying to make suspend on lid close work.
i saw in this thread that some people are aware that there's a problem.

 

i'd prefer to achieve this from within xfce4-power-manager.

 

here's the thing:

 

1. using the normal xfce desktop

     * for "when laptop lid is closed", only 'lock screen' and 'switch off diplay' are available
     * "System sleep mode" is completely grayed out, as well as security 'lock screen when system is going to sleep'
     * the 'Ask' option is available only for "Buttons". Choosing it, then choosing "Suspend" from the dialog, causes the ui to hang (desktop darkened), but after a minute i can 'escape' out of it.
     * 'systemctl suspend' suspends as expected (without locking the screen)

 

2. using plain openbox without display manager (i.e. console login & startx instead of nodm) or desktop environment, xfce4-power-manager autostarted

     * for "when laptop lid is closed", 'lock screen', 'switch off diplay', 'suspend' and 'hibernate' are available, but only the first 2 work
     * "System sleep mode" gives me a choice between 'suspend' and 'hibernate' - only suspend works (!) as expected.
     * security 'lock screen when system is going to sleep' is not greyed out, and un/checking it works as advertised
     * the 'Ask' option is available only for "Buttons". It does nothing.
     * 'systemctl suspend' suspends as expected (without locking the screen)

in other words, choice nr. 2. works in all aspects except the lid switch!
 

i tried to let systemd handle the lid switch - to no avail.

i also tried to not use xfce4-power-manager at all, only systemd - to no avail.

 

reading `man logind.conf` i notice this:

 

Quote

  HandleLidSwitch=..... Only input devices with the "power-switch" udev tag will be watched for key/lid switch events.

 

Interesting...

 

'udevadm monitor' showed nothing for opening/closing the lid.

 

dmesg showed this:

 

    hall: (D) hall_isr   

    hall: (I) HALL_CLOSE

    hall: (D) hall_isr   

    hall: (I) HALL_OPEN

 

every time i open/close the lid...

 

so, where exactly would i have to add this "power-switch" udev tag?

 

phew, my head swims... 

 

any ideas? maybe a secret solution already exists?

[Pinebook/pine64 - video playback - 2nd opinion please]

oh, there's an armbian image for the pinebook!

i installed it last night and i'm delighted to see that a recent version of mpv is the default media player!!!

Unfortunately it sometimes crashes (*), leaving me with the last image plastered all over the screen (all screens, even when i switch to another vt) - forcing me to reboot, or is there a way to tell the framebuffer (i suppose) to drop that?

 

(*) it seems to crash with larger resolutions/throughput. Tested with a x264 encoded 1920x800@3000kb/s movie, the issue is reproducible.

HEVC otoh works beautifully now, yay!

[Pinebook/pine64 - video playback - 2nd opinion please]

thank you for your detailed answer.

I was meanwhile more succesful; it seems my issues were partly some sort of panic caused by the strange way video is rendered, and partly due to ubuntu mate's general not-very-lightweightness, and its VLC version being particularly incapable of dealing with the video overlay.

once one gets used to it (either watch videos or do something else), playback is ok.

 

i meanwhile installed Q4OS; the windows-likeness does not appeal to me, but it is definitely lighter than ubuntu mate and probably much better configured - i get perfect video playback for even hi-res (1920x800, 3000kb/s) x264 video with mplayer2, and even VLC performs MUCH better.

 

On 8/22/2017 at 0:33 PM, zador.blood.stained said:

There is limited hardware video decoding support. On Linux images it is provided via a VDPAU backend and you can check the "libvdpau-sunxi" column in the status matrix for the currently supported formats and A64 column to note that H265 10bit video is not supported by hardware.

Unsing the VDPAU backend means that it easily integrates with video players like mpv, mplayer2 and VLC but you can forget about video in web browsers.

This is precious information. I will play with vdpau & my favorite, mpv...

About HEVC/H265: What's the difference between 10bit and 8bit? will I be able to watch hevc video on this machine?

I actually have here a video, and mediainfo says it's 8bit, yet both mplayer2 and vlc perform very poorly, i suspect software rendering. the versions are from debian jessie mainline, maybe backporting will help?

 

On 8/22/2017 at 0:33 PM, zador.blood.stained said:

you'll need custom patched FFmpeg/gstreamer that hopefully could be integrated into a selected OS release without breaking anything.

ah, interesting. is there a project? the search "linux arm mali ffmpeg" only points to people trying to compile it themselves...

 

[Pinebook/pine64 - video playback - 2nd opinion please]

Hello,

recently got a pinebook.

I have a strong Linux-on-PC-user background (running ArchLinux on my desktop & older netbook, and debian oldstable on my home server laptop), but not really a developer background and no experience with single board computers at all!

 

Ubuntu Mate is happily chugging along right now, but video playback (h264 packed in .mkv) is abysmal to non-existent.

 

I have tried these releases;

 

the stable 0.6.2 first:

AFAICS, it uses a frambuffer driver (fbturbo) under Xorg. video playback was more than choppy, and the UX drops to zero because the video window can't be resized and sticks to the screen, always on top across all desktops.

 

I upgraded to 0.7.8 and ran the scripts according to the rather sparse instructions (and I haven't found better instructions):

Now video playback is non-existent! But according to the glmark2-es2 benchmarking utility i get 100points. hm. i think i read on pine64 forums that the drivers responsible provide only a subset of opengl v2.0, and that subset has nothing to do with video playback. True?

 

Some additional info in this post.

 

My questions:

Is video playback possible at all?

The answers i see on pine64 forums range from "With these mplayer settings it works" or "It is OK; not perfect but usable." to "It is what it is because the driver is closed source and nothing to do" ...

I get the impression there's some self-delusion in this (who'd want to admit that getting a pinebook was a mistake)...

About the pinebook Linux releases:

Why a (the same?) 3.10 kernel in all pine64 releases?

Is an alternative OS available and will it bring improvement?

Can I install any pine64 OS, or does it have to be a binebook release (I am quite capable of setting up my own desktop, but I'm not sure how deep the differences between pine64 and pinebook run)?

 

About armbian for pine64:

A Xenial stable release is on offer. why xenial? the name "armbian" suggests debian, not ubuntu?

 

Thanks for reading.

 

PS:

I am aware that there's 2 stickies that relate to my questions; if the information I'm asking for is buried in them, I apologize and will accept any pointers given.