Please recommend a chipset/board

[djx-treme]

Hello!

Sorry for too high-level description, I'm not an experienced embedded engineer, just an enthusiast.

 

I'm going to try to run a project to build an affordable home video recorder/player and I need a brief insight on the current ones available. I'm currently using A20 and I'm looking for a possible more powerful solutions.

 

Requirements:

 - At least twice powerful computing power comparing to A20

 - Video chip with hardware acceleration support in Linux (not planning to use Android)

 - SATA with at least 40 Megabytes per second throughput (NOT crappy usb<->sata built-in adapters)

 - Network stack with at least 300Mbps bandwidth that does NOT affect CPU performance (like in Banana Pi). Ideally, 2 separated NICs

 

Ideally to be able to use several displays.

 

Maybe it sounds naive, but Is there anything on the market that can do it?

 

Thank you in advance!

[Jens Bauer]

I think there will be soon, but I'm not certain of anything I mention below; they're just hints and pointers that might/might not be helpful.

 

So far, I've not found any "one complete solution" to your request, and none of the below suggestions will run Armbian yet.

 

@tkaiser mentioned quite a few interesting boards to me; the one that stick to my memory the best is Solid-Run's awesome Community board.

While the $349 Community board does not have a built-in graphics card, it does have PCIe, which means you should be able to add a graphics card of your own choice.

I can count at least 3 S-ATA connectors on the community board, which means you could set up your harddisks in RAID configuration.

Here's a link to the Marvell Armada 8040 chipset used in the board and a direct link to the Community Board itself (also linked to by Marvell on the above page). Please note that the Armada 8040 is a Quad-core 64-bit Cortex-A72 (blazing fast).

I'd like to mention that Solid-Run makes high-quality hardware. This means it might be more expensive, but it will last a lot longer.

I think that using the Community board as a video recorder would be "extreme overkill" - in other words: I'd endorse it.

 

Solid-Run also makes the ClearFog, however, I think the Community Board would be a better choice; especially because o the PCIe, the extra S-ATA connector and the 4GB RAM.

 

MQMaker's MiTi Board was mentioned as well, but it does not use an ARM-based CPU; this CPU is only a Dual-Core MIPS running at 880MHz, so it's probably not interesting.

 

The $39 Marvell EXPRESSOBin has 3 GMAC ports and 512MB RAM or 1GB RAM; Mini PCIe interface and USB3.0. Only one S-ATA interface, though.

 

There's also the LeMaker Cello board. This board has a Quad-Core Cortex-A57. It's not as quick as the Solid-Run board, but it does have some interesting specifications. If you need both a graphics card and an extra GMAC port, you could probably split the PCIe and add two cards there - or just connect the graphics card in the PCIe slot and add an external GMAC port on one of

the USB3 ports.

 

My opinion ... If you want a quality board and you can afford it, go for Solid-Run, but since you mention that it should be "affordable", then I guess you'd hesitate on that one.

If you have very little funds, the $39 board will probably be able to do the job. Again, there's no built-in HDMI and thus no hardware graphics accelerator.

 

Above, I've not mentioned the Western Digital My Cloud EX2100 and EX4100 NAS. These have Marvell chipsets and cost around $400 - as they have a complete enclosure and space for 2 or 4 harddisks (you can stuff up to 4 x 8 GB in the EX4100), they might be interesting to you.

 

Also, you may consider attaching a second Fast Ethernet via USB, so you have one Gbit and one 100Mbit Ethernet. Good GMACs are able to transfer up to 125MB/sec; bad 100Mbit are able to transfer only up to 10MB/sec. "Up to" means: This never really hapens. If you want fast connections just in order to be able to download quickly from the net, you need to remember that when you've upgraded your line to 10Gbit Fiber and you have extremely fast hardware, the servers you connect to and download from may be connected via a slow connections. Quick internal Ethernet connections on your LAN for accessing NAS or SAN is a good investment, but a fast internet connection may be waste of money. On a 100Mbit line I usually get 2MB/sec if I'm lucky. On rare occasions I've seen 4MB/sec.

 

Anyone who have better suggestions (perhaps a single board that satisfies all the requirements), please chip in!

[ericb]

Hello,

 

Thanks for he information (I'm interested too, e.g. for students projects).

 

Maybe it's my fault, but the link you provided for the Community Board leads to sort of full flash page ? (and flash is prohibited on my machine).

 

Is there another link or another way to read it ?

 

Thanks in advance

 

--

ericb

[djx-treme]

Jens,

Thank you very much

 

Checked out all the devices:

 

 - ARMADA 8040 - $360 and doesn't have built-in GPU

 - LeMaker Cello - $300 and still unreleased.

 - ClearFog - no GPU

 - MQMaker's MiTi Board - too poor and only openwrt available (we need Debian)

 - ESPRESSOBin - no GPU

 

I need to build not t only home recorder, but player to be able to decode and play 4k video on my TV.

 

Anyone who have better suggestions (perhaps a single board that satisfies all the requirements), please chip in!

[Igor]

4k video accelerated playback is also a problem on Intel HD graphics which is overall the only HW that would fit into all of your needs almost fine: best linux support, good sata speed, more displays, enough power, more network cards, ... 

 

Check also Jean-Luc tests of media players where you will see that virtually none of 4k media players is ready for smooth 4k video playing.

[Jens Bauer]

Maybe it's my fault, but the link you provided for the Community Board leads to sort of full flash page ? (and flash is prohibited on my machine).

I'm using an old PowerMac to read the page; the https-link does not show anything on my Safari, but if changing the link to http, then it works for me (no flash stuff is present on the page I get):

 

http://www.solid-run.com/product/armada-8040-networking-community-board/

[Jens Bauer]

-ESPRESSOBin - no GPU

I think the EXPRESSOBin might be the 'closest' match.

-Especially because of the price, but also because of the S-ATA port (you could connect a RAID here for speed).

The MiniPCIe could perhaps be used for a graphics card if you're lucky - that means the graphics card would 'supply' the GPU.

Whether or not it's possible to put a working device together is a completely different matter.

 

I need to build not t only home recorder, but player to be able to decode and play 4k video on my TV.

I'm pretty sure we'll get there soon. I recently saw a chinese 4K TV (Xiaomi: http://www.mi.com/en/mitv4/) - The TV uses a MediaTek Cortex-A72 and should be able to display a 4K movie at 120FPS. -So you probably should expect 4K capable TV-boxes to contain a MediaTek CPU. Whether it has S-ATA and PCIe support, I do not know.

 

I know that Xiaomi also made a 4K TV-box, so try sending them an email and ask what they've got...

[Jens Bauer]

Though not having multiple Gigabit Ethernet ports, CubieTruck plus (CubieBoard 5) might be another candidate for this question.

An extra Gbit Ethernet port could be added via USB3.0; the internal S-ATA could be used and in addition, you'd get dual HDMI output (I don't think it's clear if two different images are possible at the same time, but at least it has "display duplication").

 

Another box which might just be able to cut it is the YokaTV KB1 box. It has two HDMI2.0 inputs and I believe it's the first of the kind (it can only capture video from one HDMI port at a time though).

The CPU is only an S905, but it's still quite interesting. I'd expect an upgrade of that box, which means I'd expect an S912 version also providing the same number of HDMI inputs but also a USB3 port (this is pure speculation).

[djx-treme]

Got Firefly RK3399 (http://en.t-firefly.com/en/firenow/Firefly_RK3399/)

 

Specs are pretty promising...

[djx-treme]

Finally ended up with Intel NUC ))))

[chrisf]

I think it's going to be many years before you can find an SBC with both excellent IO bandwidth and a high performance GPU.

 

You currently get to choose between the two.

 

I guess the reason for this is there are only really three markets for the SoC's:

1. Android tablets and phones. Needs decent GPU. Nothing more than SD/eMMC is required.
2. TV box. Needs decent GPU, still doesn't need high IO bandwidth. Wifi runs over SDIO, still doesn't need a full 1GBe network connection.
3. NAS/home server boxes. Goesn't needs a GPU at all. Needs decent SATA and NIC. High end soho expect 200MB/s with dual gbe. Mavell have this market pretty much covered. CPU doesn't need to be that great either, if they put in hardware acceleration for network/ssl/etc

I'm also not aware of any mPCIe video cards, so you'd need to go down the route of an external PCI-E enclosure. Getting ARM drivers for an AMD or nVidia card would be interesting too. I was under the assumption that if you want proper drivers for these, they come as binary blobs.