Hardware video decoding on S905X

[dreamlayers]

I have an OTT TV Box, model ABOX-A1 ( 1G + 8G, S905X ). It is running Armbian 23.11.1 bookworm. How can I have hardware video decoding?

 

Hardware video decoding support seems present in the 6.1.63-current-meson64 kernel. It seems only the V4L2 M2M API is present. Some firmware seems missing. I was getting "meson-vdec c8820000.video-codec: Direct firmware load for meson/vdec/gxl_h264.bin failed with error -2" in dmesg. I don't know what package I need to install. I was thinking maybe firmware-linux-nonfree, but that conflicts with armbian-firmware due to firmware-ralink. The files are available at https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/meson/vdec though, and I downloaded gxl_*.bin from there and put them in /lib/firmware/meson/vdec/ .

 

I've tried Kodi, mpv and ffmpeg, in Wayfire and at the text console. Kodi always uses lots of CPU, and mpv crashes whenever I use --hwdec=v4l2m2m-copy. The best result was "ffplay -vcodec h264_v4l2m2m file.mp4" at the console. That at least actually seems to use hardware decoding because I see this output: driver 'meson-vdec' on card 'Amlogic Video Decoder' in mplane mode. But the CPU utilization is actually worse, about 300%, compared to below 200% without -vcodec h264_v4l2m2m.

 

Edit: After installing mpv 0.37.0-1 and its dependencies from trixie (Debian testing), I definitely got hardware acceleration in mpv --hwdec=v4l2m2m-copy. CPU usage was less that 100% on one core. However, there were still problems with dropped frames and audio/video desynchronization, so I don't recommend this. Kodi CPU usage seems decreased too, often below 200% playing the same file, but this is still terrible for playing 720p H.264. It's not worth messing up your packages with a mix from two Debian versions only to get this.

 

Edit: The Kodi 2:20.1+dfsg-1 from Bookworm doesn't have the DRM PRIME options in "Settings > Player > Videos", so I guess it doesn't support acceleration? The Kodi 2:20.4+dfsg-1 from Trixie does have those options, and enabling them makes the video disappear. I've tried setting "PRIME Render Method" to EGL and Direct-To-Plane, and both failed in a similar way.

Edited February 19 by dreamlayers
Reporting partial success