New to Armbian, veteran to Linux, but I could use a point in the right direction for my new Orange Pi 4 LTS (RK3399) for video acceleration in Kodi

[Molski]

I have owned numerous Raspberry Pi boards over the years, and I have always have ran Kodi on one of them. For years I have been wanting to upgrade my RPi 3 as it cannot play any of my H.265/HEVC videos. With all the shortages, and how old the Raspberry Pi 4 is getting, I made a rather spontaneous purchase for this Orange Pi 4 LTS board.

 

Getting it all setup is easy enough, but of course, the video (even with H.264!) nearly maxes all 6 cores and the video is chunky as it's just doing everything without any video acceleration. Even navigating the menu seems slow and delayed. I have been scouring these forums and other sources for about 12 hours now, and I am still unsure which route to go.

 

Just as a test, I ran Kodi as root and it was much smoother in the menu system and seemed to do H.264 (in software of course, so it was working really hard). But broke Pulseaudio, as Pulse is hardcoded to not accept connections from root when it's not setup as a system-wide service. Anyway, that's not an option. Kodi doesn't need to, and shouldn't run as root.

 

I was very excited, then extremely let down when I found this post:

A custom image with custom repositories?

 

Plus, I don't want X11 or Wayland plus a window manager, I don't need it! Either way, it *seems* to be tied to a completely different chipset.

 

I've been up all night working on this, and I am starting to go delirious, so any help would be appreciated.

 

[Molski]

I should of probably included some other information.

 

A lot of the information I have to go off of is 2+ years old. So I'm not even sure what is the best way to go about it in 2023. But Kodi v19+ should just support all this out of box as far as I can tell. Here is what I think is installed which should help make this all work.

 

lsmod | grep vid
videobuf2_dma_contig    24576  3 rockchip_vdec,hantro_vpu,rockchip_iep
videobuf2_vmalloc      20480  1 hantro_vpu
videobuf2_dma_sg       24576  1 rockchip_rga
videobuf2_memops       20480  3 videobuf2_vmalloc,videobuf2_dma_contig,videobuf2_dma_sg
videobuf2_v4l2         32768  5 rockchip_vdec,hantro_vpu,rockchip_rga,rockchip_iep,v4l2_mem2mem
videobuf2_common       65536  10 rockchip_vdec,videobuf2_vmalloc,videobuf2_dma_contig,videobuf2_v4l2,hantro_vpu,rockchip_rga,videobuf2_dma_sg,rockchip_iep,v4l2_mem2mem,videobuf2_memops
videodev              262144  7 rockchip_vdec,videobuf2_v4l2,hantro_vpu,rockchip_rga,videobuf2_common,rockchip_iep,v4l2_mem2mem
mc                     61440  6 rockchip_vdec,videodev,videobuf2_v4l2,hantro_vpu,videobuf2_common,v4l2_mem2mem

 

dpkg -l | grep libva
ii  libva-drm2:arm64                     2.14.0-1                                arm64        Video Acceleration (VA) API for Linux -- DRM runtime
ii  libva-wayland2:arm64                 2.14.0-1                                arm64        Video Acceleration (VA) API for Linux -- Wayland runtime
ii  libva-x11-2:arm64                    2.14.0-1                                arm64        Video Acceleration (VA) API for Linux -- X11 runtime
ii  libva2:arm64                         2.14.0-1                                arm64        Video Acceleration (VA) API for Linux -- runtime

 

 

 

[Дмитрий Батин]

I have some problem and do not see any way to do a good support of hw (vpu) acceleration to play the video coded by x264 \ 265(hevc) 1080p or 4k

[Molski]

I spent a lot of time trying different distros, and all sorts of different things. H.264 was no problem, that definitely handles them properly. But with H.265. I've got to the point where the modules that seem to contain the H.265 support load, but throw experimental warnings all over. But they still usually either: don't work at all, or make the OS blow up.

 

I just gave up after hundreds of hours, since my decade old RPi 3 seems to do the equivalent with a lot more stability.

 

I'm just checking back every 6 months or so. Since I'm fairly sure this processor is capable of it. (But so far, that OPi4 LTS purchase was a complete waste for my purposes.)

[Hqnicolas]

 

On 7/7/2023 at 3:39 PM, Molski said:

I just gave up after hundreds of hours, since my decade old RPi 3 seems to do the equivalent with a lot more stability.
 
I'm just checking back every 6 months or so. Since I'm fairly sure this processor is capable of it. (But so far, that OPi4 LTS purchase was a complete waste for my purposes.)

 

Orange pi 4 is based on rk3399
And rockchip integrates Mali T860 MP4 GPU
You need to know that mali gpu isn't open source
So, when you buy a Mali gpu device,
It doesn't support Linux at all
Only Android will run the acceleration
h265 it's part of the closed source drivers
When you want a device that run open source and GPU together please take something like adreno gpu

Don't use SBC for video editing,
If you want a video player, user interface,
Switch to Android... it's fast, and reliable.
Armbian on rockchip device is for server side of things.

For GPU Rendering on Linux instead of Android This is what you need

Sent from my 22021211RC using Tapatalk

 

 

Edited November 25, 2023 by hotnikq

[Molski]

Quote

You need to know that mali gpu isn't open source
So, when you buy a Mali gpu device,
It doesn't support Linux at all

 

It was a rather spontaneous purchase, partly because it was really cheap. But I was unaware of that. Seemed like other people had it working by doing some searching, so I just bought it.

 

I did try Android, but I really just miss things like controlling Kodi with my TV remote. I'll probably just get something with Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc.. Or wait for the RPi 5. (With a laptop in its place until then.)

 

 

 

 

Edited July 9, 2023 by Molski

[Hqnicolas]

On 7/9/2023 at 3:42 AM, Molski said:

I did try Android, but I really just miss things like controlling Kodi with my TV remote.

I'm using H96 Max on Armbian since 2022.
and,
Because the android Chinese images from factory was infected  I can't recomend my device to run Factory original images.
but you can aways build your own cyanogen or other alternatives like LineageOS.

that's not the case for Orange Pi 4 LTS
you aways can trust the OrangePi factory to build your OS.
and Video rendering on mali GPU will aways works better on Android.


for Linux GPU Application on AARCH64 
This is what i'm talking about
 

 

Edited November 25, 2023 by hotnikq

[Molski]

This was many months ago, and Android isn't an option here. Even though I've used all of those through the fork into LineageOS.

 

Has to be actual Linux for a few reasons. I got my Pi 5. So this isn't going to be doing anything video codec related, if anything at all.

[Hqnicolas]

On 11/26/2023 at 6:23 AM, Molski said:

I got my Pi 5

 

 Broadcom VideoCore VII GPU

 

Pi 5 launch day saw 3 patches for the V3D kernel driver to enable the Raspberry Pi 5 support. These changes by Igalia amount to just around 200 lines of changed code for enabling the kernel driver support.

 

Linux 6.1-derived kernel and Mesa 23.2-rc3 with the extra patches for driver support.

 

The V3D DRM kernel driver changes will be picked-up for the Linux 6.7 cycle but that stable kernel release won't appear until early 2024.