JMCC

Here. And read the posts above about Kodi
 
 

Here. And read the posts above about Kodi
 
 

Version 20210703 for P1 and M1.
Kernel 5.10.47 5.12.14. For the Legacy version, the work with the installation of the media package has been fixed. Due to the peculiarities of installing the media package, for proper operation during subsequent system updates, I recommend freezing the current kernel, it differs from those that arrive in network repositories (the list of supported modules and devices has been significantly expanded).

Hey, that looks very good!

Hi,
 
I did some more tests and it turned out, that there is little difference between LE and armbian legacy for x264 or avc movies - but I found no movieplayer, that worked half as good as armbian legacy with vc-1 movies.
Don't have that many movies with vc-1 but some much-loved like inception ...
 
I already wrote, that I use rockpi as movieplayer together with a beamer, so session selection of armbian legacy is suboptimal for me, as about 10-15% on top and bottom of the screen are invisible (outside of screen). Lightdm/xfce is so dumb, that icons in topbar will not be scaled to bar height, which works fine for second bar ...
Sadly I didn't find any other greeter, that runs on armbian and is more attractive like lightdm-gtk-greeter.
So I started to build my own, which took lot more of time than expected ...
 
any way - I finally have a working sample:

 
is uses gtk too, so it works with armbian.
 
I check the available sessions and if there's no session definition for kody-gbm, the kodi-button will be disabled (as in the screenshot taken from my desktop computer).
Font- and button-size have been increased for a screen distance of 3m approximately.
 
Last login will be cached, so user will be prefilled and hitting ENTER in the password field will login to the last session. Left most button starts kody and right most button the desktop.
 

Moved from the RK3399 multimedia integration thread to here, since the post is not related to the MM integration, and not even to Armbian.

You must take into account not only the processor specs, but also the kernel support. I would stay away from Amlogic for that reason, and bring in Rockchip into the equation.

You must take into account not only the processor specs, but also the kernel support. I would stay away from Amlogic for that reason, and bring in Rockchip into the equation.

No, it is the opposite. In legacy you can overclock to 2.0/1.5Ghz (like mainline), or to 2.2/1.7Ghz (extreme, needs active cooling). You only need to activate the corresponding overlay in armbian-config

IT'S FINALLY HERE...

THE OFFICIAL ROCKCHIP-LEGACY MULTIMEDIA INTEGRATION
 
After two years of using a separate script to enable the multimedia features in RK3288/3328 Legacy Kernel, the whole framework has been incorporated to the official Armbian packaging system. The choice distro for this integration is Debian Buster (see FAQ at the end of this post about the reasons).
 
I. Installation
Download a Armbian Buster Legacy Desktop image for your board, and install it with the standard Armbian method. Install the complete multimedia solution with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade sudo apt install media-buster-legacy-tinkerboard --install-recommends ## Or ## sudo apt install media-buster-legacy-rk3328 --install-recommends The switch "--install-recommends" will add the whole Kodi binary addons collection (retro-gaming cores, music visualizations, screensavers, additional media decoders/encoders, vfs, etc.), plus the GLES-to-OpenGL wrapper "gl4es".  
II. Features
Accelerated GLES/EGL X desktop: No action needed. Accelerated Chromium, with WebGL and video display acceleration: No action needed Desktop video player capable of smooth 4K HEVC-HDR: Use the "Rockchip Gst Player" from the Multimedia menu, or choose it with right-click on the media file. Command-line 4K playing is also possible with "gst-play-1.0 --videosink=kmssink". RKMPP-accelerated MPV: Use normally for standard operation (windowed with mouse-operated GUI). For fullscreen, keyboard-operated mode, use the command line switch "--gpu-context=drm" (this will allow you to play smooth 4K).
        - See instructions below, in the next post, for playing Youtube videos up to 4k with this MPV. ISP Camera with real-time h.264/1080p HW encoding (RK3288 only): Using the Gstreamer Plugin. Check this wiki for instructions on how to use it. Most of it applies to Armbian, except for the selection of ov5647/imx219 camera, which must be done using DT overlays. OpenCL 1.2 support (RK3288 only): It will be fully functional, no further action needed. You can download some tests and examples from this link. Kodi 18.9 Leia with full RKMPP+GBM acceleration, 4K-HDR capable: You can start it from Light DM menu as your user account: 
 
Alternatively, you can also run it as a system service with these command lines: sudo systemctl disable lightdm sudo systemctl enable kodi-gbm sudo reboot  
Full collection of Kodi binary add-ons: Includes retrogaming cores, media encoders and decoders, PVR, screensavers, vfs and audio visualizations. They are all installed with the package "kodi-addons-full", but are disabled by default. They need to be enabled individually within the Kodi GUI. OpenGL 2.1 support through the gl4es wrapper: It is installed with the package "gl4es", with no further action needed.  
III. Sources
This is the list of the sources used for the packages:
 
IV. FAQ
¿Why did you use Debian Buster as a base for this implementation?
It was the most appropriate for several reasons. Upstream Rockchip-Linux developers use Debian buster, so the software could be ported with less modifications than if we chose a different distro. Besides, it is a completely stable distro, unlike Bullseye, which is a moving target as of today. It also has Chromium as a package, unlike Focal that uses snap instead. For last, it has a good backports repo, with several libs that would otherwise need to be compiled and maintained if we chose, for example, Focal.
  ¿Why Legacy instead of Mainline?
This is an implementation based on the vendor's BSP kernel. It has been tested and is reliable, which many people will prefer rather than having a bleeding-edge, less stable implementation. In addition to that, Mainline upstream multimedia support is still a WIP, and lacks many features that are only present on Legacy kernels.
  ¿Will you add new features to this implementation?
No, this implementation will only receive bug fixes if necessary. From now on, all multimedia work will be focused on Mainline and recent distros (like Focal or Bullseye). All new features will go there.

Decoding is done in software, but the video is displayed in a HW accelerated EGL layer. Otherwise it would not be possible to have vsync and smooth 1080p@60
 
AFAIK Chromium has no HW decoding support in Linux. There was some work going on for using v4l2, I am not sure if it made it into the release already 

The issue has been discussed and solved in a recent post for OPi PC, it should also work for Zero
 

Package update in the repos. It reverts back the addition of station-m1 and station-p1 kernels, to the previous state, when everything worked fine. We are keeping the "Depends" relationship to the legacy kernel, since the package actually depends on the legacy kernel: it won't work with a different kernel, and even more it will break the system if installed.

Sorry, I was away. I'll try to fix it ASAP

I have found a bit too hard to configure HW encoding with TVHeadend. It doesn't give you the possibility of specifying custom ffmpeg commands, so your only chance is creating a pipe in each mux, which AFAIK it can only be done with IPTV muxes. I haven't even tried this.
 
What I do is using the Jellyfin TVHeadend plugin, so I let Jellyfin do the transcoding. That also gives me easy and secure access to my TV channels from outside my home.
 
The device I am using is a Odroid HC1. XU4 and its derivatives (HC1/HC2/MC1) has always been my recommended device for anything requiring HW accelerated encoding, since it has a standard v4l2-m2m interface supported by ffmpeg. AFAIK, there is no other ARM board offering this feature as of today. Plus, since it is an older device, it's being sold for $50, a real bargain for what it offers IMO.
 
If there is people interested in a tutorial on how to do this setup, I think I can do one.

IT'S FINALLY HERE...

THE OFFICIAL ROCKCHIP-LEGACY MULTIMEDIA INTEGRATION
 
After two years of using a separate script to enable the multimedia features in RK3288/3328 Legacy Kernel, the whole framework has been incorporated to the official Armbian packaging system. The choice distro for this integration is Debian Buster (see FAQ at the end of this post about the reasons).
 
I. Installation
Download a Armbian Buster Legacy Desktop image for your board, and install it with the standard Armbian method. Install the complete multimedia solution with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade sudo apt install media-buster-legacy-tinkerboard --install-recommends ## Or ## sudo apt install media-buster-legacy-rk3328 --install-recommends The switch "--install-recommends" will add the whole Kodi binary addons collection (retro-gaming cores, music visualizations, screensavers, additional media decoders/encoders, vfs, etc.), plus the GLES-to-OpenGL wrapper "gl4es".  
II. Features
Accelerated GLES/EGL X desktop: No action needed. Accelerated Chromium, with WebGL and video display acceleration: No action needed Desktop video player capable of smooth 4K HEVC-HDR: Use the "Rockchip Gst Player" from the Multimedia menu, or choose it with right-click on the media file. Command-line 4K playing is also possible with "gst-play-1.0 --videosink=kmssink". RKMPP-accelerated MPV: Use normally for standard operation (windowed with mouse-operated GUI). For fullscreen, keyboard-operated mode, use the command line switch "--gpu-context=drm" (this will allow you to play smooth 4K).
        - See instructions below, in the next post, for playing Youtube videos up to 4k with this MPV. ISP Camera with real-time h.264/1080p HW encoding (RK3288 only): Using the Gstreamer Plugin. Check this wiki for instructions on how to use it. Most of it applies to Armbian, except for the selection of ov5647/imx219 camera, which must be done using DT overlays. OpenCL 1.2 support (RK3288 only): It will be fully functional, no further action needed. You can download some tests and examples from this link. Kodi 18.9 Leia with full RKMPP+GBM acceleration, 4K-HDR capable: You can start it from Light DM menu as your user account: 
 
Alternatively, you can also run it as a system service with these command lines: sudo systemctl disable lightdm sudo systemctl enable kodi-gbm sudo reboot  
Full collection of Kodi binary add-ons: Includes retrogaming cores, media encoders and decoders, PVR, screensavers, vfs and audio visualizations. They are all installed with the package "kodi-addons-full", but are disabled by default. They need to be enabled individually within the Kodi GUI. OpenGL 2.1 support through the gl4es wrapper: It is installed with the package "gl4es", with no further action needed.  
III. Sources
This is the list of the sources used for the packages:
 
IV. FAQ
¿Why did you use Debian Buster as a base for this implementation?
It was the most appropriate for several reasons. Upstream Rockchip-Linux developers use Debian buster, so the software could be ported with less modifications than if we chose a different distro. Besides, it is a completely stable distro, unlike Bullseye, which is a moving target as of today. It also has Chromium as a package, unlike Focal that uses snap instead. For last, it has a good backports repo, with several libs that would otherwise need to be compiled and maintained if we chose, for example, Focal.
  ¿Why Legacy instead of Mainline?
This is an implementation based on the vendor's BSP kernel. It has been tested and is reliable, which many people will prefer rather than having a bleeding-edge, less stable implementation. In addition to that, Mainline upstream multimedia support is still a WIP, and lacks many features that are only present on Legacy kernels.
  ¿Will you add new features to this implementation?
No, this implementation will only receive bug fixes if necessary. From now on, all multimedia work will be focused on Mainline and recent distros (like Focal or Bullseye). All new features will go there.

Search the forums. Don't expect official documents: as we have stated several times, Rock64 is not supported by Armbian, and therefore we won't put resources into it. If you, or any other community member, wants to work on documenting the problems or fixing them, feel free to do it. I don't even own the board.
 
And please start a different thread on the "Peer-to-Peer Support" subforum. Any further post about the Rock64 problems will be deleted from this thread.

IT'S FINALLY HERE...

THE OFFICIAL ROCKCHIP-LEGACY MULTIMEDIA INTEGRATION
 
After two years of using a separate script to enable the multimedia features in RK3288/3328 Legacy Kernel, the whole framework has been incorporated to the official Armbian packaging system. The choice distro for this integration is Debian Buster (see FAQ at the end of this post about the reasons).
 
I. Installation
Download a Armbian Buster Legacy Desktop image for your board, and install it with the standard Armbian method. Install the complete multimedia solution with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade sudo apt install media-buster-legacy-tinkerboard --install-recommends ## Or ## sudo apt install media-buster-legacy-rk3328 --install-recommends The switch "--install-recommends" will add the whole Kodi binary addons collection (retro-gaming cores, music visualizations, screensavers, additional media decoders/encoders, vfs, etc.), plus the GLES-to-OpenGL wrapper "gl4es".  
II. Features
Accelerated GLES/EGL X desktop: No action needed. Accelerated Chromium, with WebGL and video display acceleration: No action needed Desktop video player capable of smooth 4K HEVC-HDR: Use the "Rockchip Gst Player" from the Multimedia menu, or choose it with right-click on the media file. Command-line 4K playing is also possible with "gst-play-1.0 --videosink=kmssink". RKMPP-accelerated MPV: Use normally for standard operation (windowed with mouse-operated GUI). For fullscreen, keyboard-operated mode, use the command line switch "--gpu-context=drm" (this will allow you to play smooth 4K).
        - See instructions below, in the next post, for playing Youtube videos up to 4k with this MPV. ISP Camera with real-time h.264/1080p HW encoding (RK3288 only): Using the Gstreamer Plugin. Check this wiki for instructions on how to use it. Most of it applies to Armbian, except for the selection of ov5647/imx219 camera, which must be done using DT overlays. OpenCL 1.2 support (RK3288 only): It will be fully functional, no further action needed. You can download some tests and examples from this link. Kodi 18.9 Leia with full RKMPP+GBM acceleration, 4K-HDR capable: You can start it from Light DM menu as your user account: 
 
Alternatively, you can also run it as a system service with these command lines: sudo systemctl disable lightdm sudo systemctl enable kodi-gbm sudo reboot  
Full collection of Kodi binary add-ons: Includes retrogaming cores, media encoders and decoders, PVR, screensavers, vfs and audio visualizations. They are all installed with the package "kodi-addons-full", but are disabled by default. They need to be enabled individually within the Kodi GUI. OpenGL 2.1 support through the gl4es wrapper: It is installed with the package "gl4es", with no further action needed.  
III. Sources
This is the list of the sources used for the packages:
 
IV. FAQ
¿Why did you use Debian Buster as a base for this implementation?
It was the most appropriate for several reasons. Upstream Rockchip-Linux developers use Debian buster, so the software could be ported with less modifications than if we chose a different distro. Besides, it is a completely stable distro, unlike Bullseye, which is a moving target as of today. It also has Chromium as a package, unlike Focal that uses snap instead. For last, it has a good backports repo, with several libs that would otherwise need to be compiled and maintained if we chose, for example, Focal.
  ¿Why Legacy instead of Mainline?
This is an implementation based on the vendor's BSP kernel. It has been tested and is reliable, which many people will prefer rather than having a bleeding-edge, less stable implementation. In addition to that, Mainline upstream multimedia support is still a WIP, and lacks many features that are only present on Legacy kernels.
  ¿Will you add new features to this implementation?
No, this implementation will only receive bug fixes if necessary. From now on, all multimedia work will be focused on Mainline and recent distros (like Focal or Bullseye). All new features will go there.

IT'S FINALLY HERE...

THE OFFICIAL ROCKCHIP-LEGACY MULTIMEDIA INTEGRATION
 
After two years of using a separate script to enable the multimedia features in RK3288/3328 Legacy Kernel, the whole framework has been incorporated to the official Armbian packaging system. The choice distro for this integration is Debian Buster (see FAQ at the end of this post about the reasons).
 
I. Installation
Download a Armbian Buster Legacy Desktop image for your board, and install it with the standard Armbian method. Install the complete multimedia solution with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade sudo apt install media-buster-legacy-tinkerboard --install-recommends ## Or ## sudo apt install media-buster-legacy-rk3328 --install-recommends The switch "--install-recommends" will add the whole Kodi binary addons collection (retro-gaming cores, music visualizations, screensavers, additional media decoders/encoders, vfs, etc.), plus the GLES-to-OpenGL wrapper "gl4es".  
II. Features
Accelerated GLES/EGL X desktop: No action needed. Accelerated Chromium, with WebGL and video display acceleration: No action needed Desktop video player capable of smooth 4K HEVC-HDR: Use the "Rockchip Gst Player" from the Multimedia menu, or choose it with right-click on the media file. Command-line 4K playing is also possible with "gst-play-1.0 --videosink=kmssink". RKMPP-accelerated MPV: Use normally for standard operation (windowed with mouse-operated GUI). For fullscreen, keyboard-operated mode, use the command line switch "--gpu-context=drm" (this will allow you to play smooth 4K).
        - See instructions below, in the next post, for playing Youtube videos up to 4k with this MPV. ISP Camera with real-time h.264/1080p HW encoding (RK3288 only): Using the Gstreamer Plugin. Check this wiki for instructions on how to use it. Most of it applies to Armbian, except for the selection of ov5647/imx219 camera, which must be done using DT overlays. OpenCL 1.2 support (RK3288 only): It will be fully functional, no further action needed. You can download some tests and examples from this link. Kodi 18.9 Leia with full RKMPP+GBM acceleration, 4K-HDR capable: You can start it from Light DM menu as your user account: 
 
Alternatively, you can also run it as a system service with these command lines: sudo systemctl disable lightdm sudo systemctl enable kodi-gbm sudo reboot  
Full collection of Kodi binary add-ons: Includes retrogaming cores, media encoders and decoders, PVR, screensavers, vfs and audio visualizations. They are all installed with the package "kodi-addons-full", but are disabled by default. They need to be enabled individually within the Kodi GUI. OpenGL 2.1 support through the gl4es wrapper: It is installed with the package "gl4es", with no further action needed.  
III. Sources
This is the list of the sources used for the packages:
 
IV. FAQ
¿Why did you use Debian Buster as a base for this implementation?
It was the most appropriate for several reasons. Upstream Rockchip-Linux developers use Debian buster, so the software could be ported with less modifications than if we chose a different distro. Besides, it is a completely stable distro, unlike Bullseye, which is a moving target as of today. It also has Chromium as a package, unlike Focal that uses snap instead. For last, it has a good backports repo, with several libs that would otherwise need to be compiled and maintained if we chose, for example, Focal.
  ¿Why Legacy instead of Mainline?
This is an implementation based on the vendor's BSP kernel. It has been tested and is reliable, which many people will prefer rather than having a bleeding-edge, less stable implementation. In addition to that, Mainline upstream multimedia support is still a WIP, and lacks many features that are only present on Legacy kernels.
  ¿Will you add new features to this implementation?
No, this implementation will only receive bug fixes if necessary. From now on, all multimedia work will be focused on Mainline and recent distros (like Focal or Bullseye). All new features will go there.

I created Kodi packages for v4l2-request, tested on Orange Pi+2e (Allwinner H3) running Armbian Bullseye with the current 5.10.y kernel.
 
So far, HW video playing works fine with MPEG2 and h.264 up to 1080p. Kernel patches are needed to improve resolution and codec support. GUI performance is just enough, but it can probably be also improved with kernel patches.
 
So the userspace part is now working, the kernel improvements remain in the TO-DO list.
 
Packages can be found here: https://users.armbian.com/jmcc/packages/kodi-mainline/
 
These should still be considered WIP, although fully functional already. Instructions:
Download the packages for your architecture, and install them with "dpkg -i". Only kodi-mainline and kodi-mainline-bin are essential, the others are optional. Run "apt -f install" Make sure there is no X server running, and start kodi from console typing "kodi" @balbes150 you may be interested in this. They should also work in Rockchip, but I haven't tested yet.

Essentialy, yes. VPU is identical in last generation SoC's RK3328 and RK3399, lacking VP9 capabilities in the older RK3288.
 
GPU, on the other hand, is very similar in the high-end SoC's (RK3288 and RK3399), much faster and supporting OpenGLES 3 and OpenCL 1.2. The weaker one, RK3328, supports only GLES2 and no OpenCL, plus no ISP camera either.
 
There is also a parallel solution for Odroid XU4, I will document it soon. In that case, VPU decoding capabilities are reduced (no 4K, only 1080p). But GPU is the strongest one, as well as VPU encoding.

Is there also a status page for the status page? Just to make sure, we know what to do, if the status page is not available

We have a realtime status page for primary Armbian web resources available here:
 
https://status.armbian.com
 

LOL No, man, I'm not that old!

IT'S FINALLY HERE...

THE OFFICIAL ROCKCHIP-LEGACY MULTIMEDIA INTEGRATION
 
After two years of using a separate script to enable the multimedia features in RK3288/3328 Legacy Kernel, the whole framework has been incorporated to the official Armbian packaging system. The choice distro for this integration is Debian Buster (see FAQ at the end of this post about the reasons).
 
I. Installation
Download a Armbian Buster Legacy Desktop image for your board, and install it with the standard Armbian method. Install the complete multimedia solution with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade sudo apt install media-buster-legacy-tinkerboard --install-recommends ## Or ## sudo apt install media-buster-legacy-rk3328 --install-recommends The switch "--install-recommends" will add the whole Kodi binary addons collection (retro-gaming cores, music visualizations, screensavers, additional media decoders/encoders, vfs, etc.), plus the GLES-to-OpenGL wrapper "gl4es".  
II. Features
Accelerated GLES/EGL X desktop: No action needed. Accelerated Chromium, with WebGL and video display acceleration: No action needed Desktop video player capable of smooth 4K HEVC-HDR: Use the "Rockchip Gst Player" from the Multimedia menu, or choose it with right-click on the media file. Command-line 4K playing is also possible with "gst-play-1.0 --videosink=kmssink". RKMPP-accelerated MPV: Use normally for standard operation (windowed with mouse-operated GUI). For fullscreen, keyboard-operated mode, use the command line switch "--gpu-context=drm" (this will allow you to play smooth 4K).
        - See instructions below, in the next post, for playing Youtube videos up to 4k with this MPV. ISP Camera with real-time h.264/1080p HW encoding (RK3288 only): Using the Gstreamer Plugin. Check this wiki for instructions on how to use it. Most of it applies to Armbian, except for the selection of ov5647/imx219 camera, which must be done using DT overlays. OpenCL 1.2 support (RK3288 only): It will be fully functional, no further action needed. You can download some tests and examples from this link. Kodi 18.9 Leia with full RKMPP+GBM acceleration, 4K-HDR capable: You can start it from Light DM menu as your user account: 
 
Alternatively, you can also run it as a system service with these command lines: sudo systemctl disable lightdm sudo systemctl enable kodi-gbm sudo reboot  
Full collection of Kodi binary add-ons: Includes retrogaming cores, media encoders and decoders, PVR, screensavers, vfs and audio visualizations. They are all installed with the package "kodi-addons-full", but are disabled by default. They need to be enabled individually within the Kodi GUI. OpenGL 2.1 support through the gl4es wrapper: It is installed with the package "gl4es", with no further action needed.  
III. Sources
This is the list of the sources used for the packages:
 
IV. FAQ
¿Why did you use Debian Buster as a base for this implementation?
It was the most appropriate for several reasons. Upstream Rockchip-Linux developers use Debian buster, so the software could be ported with less modifications than if we chose a different distro. Besides, it is a completely stable distro, unlike Bullseye, which is a moving target as of today. It also has Chromium as a package, unlike Focal that uses snap instead. For last, it has a good backports repo, with several libs that would otherwise need to be compiled and maintained if we chose, for example, Focal.
  ¿Why Legacy instead of Mainline?
This is an implementation based on the vendor's BSP kernel. It has been tested and is reliable, which many people will prefer rather than having a bleeding-edge, less stable implementation. In addition to that, Mainline upstream multimedia support is still a WIP, and lacks many features that are only present on Legacy kernels.
  ¿Will you add new features to this implementation?
No, this implementation will only receive bug fixes if necessary. From now on, all multimedia work will be focused on Mainline and recent distros (like Focal or Bullseye). All new features will go there.