VPU Encoding (Transcoding) for RK3229 with Kernel4.4 (legacy) TVHEADEND

[Alex83]

Hey guys,

 

wanna chat about the possibilities to use TVboxes with TVheadend with VPU Encoding/hardware accelleration. There is VAAPI support for some devices like RK3229 with legacy kernel 4.4. Does anyone have any experience or experiments ongoing? I read that @JMCC did some experiments with TVHeadend. So maybe we can have some research here.

 

Cheers and happy developing

[JMCC]

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.