Options for Media Playback in HD

[Sonikku]

Hi
I have used Armbian quite a bit now for various projects with great success and even debugged my own hard-to-solve issues.
I am considering using an H3 based board (OrangePi + 2E) to replace the cheap junk media player I use. Incidentally Armbian will run on that device, but I am not sure what the video support is like- its a RockChip RK3xxx series SoC.

Now, out of the box, Armbian (Buster, Focal, etc..) video playback stutters on Full HD (720p and up) content, particularly at full screen.

I understand this is because I need to install a binary blob driver for the GPU? I've done this on normal desktop PCs before running Ubuntu, which is very easy to do, however when it comes to Armbian I am a little bit unsure.

 

I have searched the forum here and it seems that, if my understanding is correct, I need to compile Armbian myself with the specific options set to use the Sunxi-Cedrus driver?

What is the easiest way to proceed? I have a Ubuntu box to compile the kernel available, if needed.

[Werner]

Moved to p2p. The Bug tracker forums are for officially supported boards and their issues only.

 

7 minutes ago, Sonikku said:

I need to compile Armbian myself with the specific options set to use the Sunxi-Cedrus driver?

Nope. cedrus is included in all relevant images for quite a while now. However how well it works i out of scope of Armbian since this is userspace. Also Armbian has no influence on the upstream driver quality and there is most likely a reason why it is still marked as staging upstream.

[Sonikku]

Thanks, sorry about posting in the incorrect place.
If the graphics driver is included, then that's good, how do I enable it because I've tried and it doesn't seem to make a difference. I played extensively with VLC to try and enable video acceleration.

[Werner]

1 hour ago, Sonikku said:

Thanks, sorry about posting in the incorrect place.

No worries.

1 hour ago, Sonikku said:

how do I enable it

lsmod and make sure cedrus is loaded. Everything beyond I don't know. Never played with.

[Sonikku]

Thanks Werner
I actually compiled Cedrus from source and installed it that way between your reply and now.
It seems the improvement in video is marginal, or I've done something else wrong.
I will check my steps again and test it because I noticed after the fact the authors have a test utility which exercises the hardware CODEC.
But for now I've spent a whole day on this, will check again tomorrow.

[Sonikku]

As a sanity check I downloaded an H3Droid image and configured it on the OPi + 2E.
It works, it plays back 1080p content no problem. This means the hardware is capable of satisfying my requirements.

I did a lsmod- and sunxi-cedrus is loaded- the version I compiled from source. This explains the marginal improvement.

The question now on my mind is- is Armbian the right OS for my particular use case?

 

Android is not ideal in terms of development, because from my point of view, the Android SDK and all that kind of development is just painfully bloated and OOP-heavy.
I've been involved in products developed on that platform, and there's always issues.

Armbian has been an absolute joy-  from vanilla C, Golang, and Python 3. You can do anything and fire and forget.. the OS is reliable enough for mission critical stuff.
It would be awesome to get the video right, therefore if anyone has done it, or can spare the time to assist me I would really appreciate it.

I have heard tales of people using drivers from Android, wrapping them and using them in Linux.

Another issue with H3Droid is it seems to be one single person doing it, and we all know how that kind of development can lead to issues- I am not even talking about LGPL and such.