Hardware acceleration doesn't work

OlegRjabkov · May 22, 2020

Hi all!

I sadly found that I can't watch my videos. Everything's fine with youtube, nevertheless. But video I tested (h264 + avc1, m4v and avi containers) looks like fast slideshow, and sound is VERY ugly!

I've tried to install mali-midgard-dkms, I've failed (see below).

What should I do to watch the videos? Convert 'em all to some chosen codec? Add to sources.list kind of "unstable" thing and upgrade? Install another armbian image? Find proper mali drivers and compile it carefully?

Please, help!

armbianmonitor -u
http://ix.io/2mXg

__@opi3 ~ # apt-get install mali-midgard-dkms                                                                                                                     9:14:29
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
mali-midgard-dkms is already the newest version (16.0+pristine-4).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 
Setting up mali-midgard-dkms (16.0+pristine-4) ...
Building for 5.4.28-sunxi64
Building for architecture arm64
This package appears to be a binaries-only package
 you will not be able to build against kernel 5.4.28-sunxi64
 since the package source was not provided
Removing old mali-midgard-16.0 DKMS files...

------------------------------
Deleting module version: 16.0
completely from the DKMS tree.
------------------------------
Done.
Loading new mali-midgard-16.0 DKMS files...
Building for 5.4.28-sunxi64
Building initial module for 5.4.28-sunxi64
Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 5.4.28-sunxi64 (aarch64)
Consult /var/lib/dkms/mali-midgard/16.0/build/make.log for more information.
dpkg: error processing package mali-midgard-dkms (--configure):
 installed mali-midgard-dkms package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 10
Errors were encountered while processing:
 mali-midgard-dkms
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

__@opi3 ~ # apt-get install mali-t76x-x11-driver                                                                                                                  9:49:35
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 mali-t76x-x11-driver:armhf : Depends: mali-midgard-dkms:armhf but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Edited May 22, 2020 by OlegRjabkov

Werner · May 22, 2020

No idea what that package does.

Check

OlegRjabkov · May 22, 2020

It looks like ubuntu-bases armbians are better supported than debian-based...

OlegRjabkov · May 25, 2020

On 5/22/2020 at 7:01 AM, Werner said:

No idea what that package does.

Check

Expand

Well, I tried a lot. I'm not strong enough, I think.
Panfrost didn't change anything, despite I used the script. Maybe, I did something wrong. Maybe, guys like me need instructions-for-dummies: what words to put in xorg.conf; what permissions, symlinks, additional packages and such to make... All these allwinners seem to be designed for professionals while I was going to use it just for home video watching. Now I see H6 is definitely bad choice for that. So I gonna try wayland things as I have a rumour about little better support on this way.
And I wish you all the best! Linux must be everywhere.

jernej · May 25, 2020

On 5/25/2020 at 11:58 AM, OlegRjabkov said:

All these allwinners seem to be designed for professionals while I was going to use it just for home video watching. Now I see H6 is definitely bad choice for that.

Expand

Not true. I maintain Allwinner port of LibreELEC and I must say that I'm pleased with H6 multimedia performance. You can try images here.

Note that GPU doesn't provide any video decoding. There is VPU for that, but browsers on Linux lag a bit with integration of HW accelerated decoding. On top of that, VPU drivers are wip, so properly put whole video stack together is a bit challenging at the moment. That's why pre-built LibreELEC images exist in the first place.

OlegRjabkov · May 28, 2020

On 5/25/2020 at 3:32 PM, jernej said:

Not true. I maintain Allwinner port of LibreELEC and I must say that I'm pleased with H6 multimedia performance. You can try images here.

Note that GPU doesn't provide any video decoding. There is VPU for that, but browsers on Linux lag a bit with integration of HW accelerated decoding. On top of that, VPU drivers are wip, so properly put whole video stack together is a bit challenging at the moment. That's why pre-built LibreELEC images exist in the first place.

Expand

Thanks a lot! I'll try!

OlegRjabkov · May 29, 2020

Thank you, jernej, very much. I never knew KODI before. LibreELEC makes my Orange able to give me all I want! Exept comfortable xfce-like interface, of course

I've yet not figured out how to change keyboard layout with real keyboard, but even if it's impossible, LibreELEC is so cool!

Werner · May 30, 2020

I guess that means Armbian is still missing some patches or whatever for H6. I tried to dig through the soures from LibreELEC but could not find something spectacular...