Is it possible to play videos with Kodi on Orange Pi 3 LTS ?

[gop3k]

Hello, sorry for the dumb questions incoming, thanks for your time.

Lately I spent a lot of time searching for a working image to run Kodi with wifi/ethernet/bluetooh on this board.
Does anybody managed to play videos on Kodi on this SBC ? If yes, what armbian image should I choose for this purpose ?
Do I have to build the image myself ?
 

Tested LibreElec for this but no wifi because the drivers are out-of-the-tree, not in mainline Kernel.

Read about my problem in many posts but didn't find what I was searching for... Not even sure if this SBC can be used as a linux media player.

Any tip/link/guide/wiki on how to successfully install kodi/hardware acceleration/video decoding/needed drivers for this board will be much appreciated.
 

Edited March 2 by gop3k

[Troy H]

Hi @gop3k I've been having the same issues on the Orange Pi 3 LTS. Video is really choppy and unwatchable, and I can't figure out why.

 

I know it's possible to play video smoothly on this board because I can do so with the Android OS that came on the device. I actually reinstalled Android on an sd card (you have to use Allwinner's proprietary sd flashing tool) so I could actually use it for Kodi in the short term. But ideally I'd like to get Armbian working.

 

I'm using a recent Armbian build for the Orange Pi 3 LTS: Armbian_community_24.8.0-trunk.495_Orangepi3-lts_noble_current_6.6.36_gnome_desktop

 

I have done some research, which I'll outline below. I'm certain some of my understanding must be wrong, so take that for what it's worth. If someone is willing to correct me I'm happy to be corrected.

 

I think that the gpu is not working properly in the most recent builds. I found that in older builds using Allwinner H6 chips that some people had to manually enable the GPU, but it looks like it is enabled but not working properly.

 

The Allwinner H6 has a Mali-T720 MP2 GPU and Panfrost is the open source driver for it. I used the commands from here to make sure Panfrost is installed, enabled, and working. Which all seemed to be true in this build. But when I run glmark2 I get a score of around 85-100. Based on research this seems to be half of what the Allwinner H6 is capable of.

 

Running armbian-config I see the option to enable hardware features, and as far as I know, this shows the different overlays you can enable in the device tree to tell the kernel about your hardware. These overlays are located in /boot/dts/allwinner/overlay/.

A problem with the overlays is that many of them seem to be for the Allwinner H616 cpu. Which I know is just an updated version of the H6, but I'm wondering if that's causing problems.

There is an option to enable the H616 gpu, which I turned on, then restarted. I still got the same 85-100 range of scores in glmark2.

 

Could it be that Armbian is trying to use settings for the H616 instead of the H6 and that could be causing problems?

 

I tried doing a custom build myself, which failed so I'll need to look into that if I want to try it again. But for now I'm going to try using an older automated build to see if that makes any difference. I'll respond again if I have anything to report.

 

[Troy H]

Here to report back.... I couldn't get anything to work. I tried a lot of things over a long time, and nothing. I've read through forum posts, I've tried running a custom build multiple times which either failed or wouldn't boot. I am feeling pretty hopeless about this board ever working for video with linux.

 

I guess I'll just have to install the Android back onto it and live with that until I buy another board. I read somewhere that the orange pi 3b is a better version of the 3 LTS, and it looks to have more support everywhere. I guess I'll try that next. I don't know of any other boards in this price range that should be able to do 4k video.

 

 

[jernej]

If you want Kodi and smooth video playback, you can always check LibreELEC. OPi3-LTS has some bugs, so best build is here, but you can wait for next point release which will be done in about a week.

 

Video playback needs some work in progress software if you want smooth experience, which afaik is not present (yet) in Armbian.

[greenais]

Hi @jernej could you elaborate perhaps what have been done on LibreELEC side to get hardware acceleration work on OPi3-LTS? Is it somehow related to v4l2_request module for VA drivers which was mentioned in several other treads elsewhere?
For my tasks LibreELEC is little bit too much narrow in terms of multi-purpose usage of such a quite powerful SBC.
I was really hoping to get much more out of this board when suddenly bumped into lack of quite basic functionality in modern Armbian... To stay on vendor's HWA-enabled Android isn't option for me, so I'm ready to invest my time in order to get even basic HWA working in Armbian.
To my point there is quite little we can expect here from Debian Panfrost guys, they clearly stated that HW acceleration is out of their focus at all (yet? for years already)

 

Edited December 20 by greenais

[Igor]

8 hours ago, greenais said:

lack of quite basic functionality in modern Armbian

 

I just re-installed Armbian on my x86 server. It works perfectly!  

 

We had to drop most of Orangepi hardware due to extreme costs and absolute absence of means to cover them. Anyway most of people are convinced that we are not doing anything (Armbian is just a Debian fork) and that when some hardware reaches mainline, Armbian is pointless, while we lost thousands of hours for each release. 

 

8 hours ago, greenais said:

I'm ready to invest my time in order to get even basic HWA working in Armbian.

 

Not that we would not like to help you, we are unable to help you. Applying a pressure and asking overloaded and over-stressed developers  is very wrong path to get this done. Just do R&D and open a PR and make it perfect state so it won't make us more damages. 

 

Even you are willing to dedicated your time, you need a team to support you. And that we cannot provide to you. Our team, barely manage to maintain the basics on this platform and there is nothing we can do about. Nobody cares until it starts to break apart, when its too late and beyond repair.

 

Review is hard work and we are asking for help - you totally ignore it, while you expect significantly more and all the time. Since you know something about this, I am aware you are capable to review everything that comes in and after half a year we will help you around your mission around "HWA working on your computer". We don't need that, you do.

 

8 hours ago, greenais said:

Debian Panfrost guys,

What has Debian to do with Panfrost?

[greenais]

I clearly understand (almost) all you've written above - that's why there is "I'm ready to invest my time" instead of "shut up and give me everything for free, I said - NOW!"
"Talk is cheap, send patches." - really good point, sure, my support.

 

8 hours ago, Igor said:

What has Debian to do with Panfrost?

Probably something to support their own statements "On Debian 11 and newer, you're required to use the free and open-source Panfrost/Lima drivers" - in terms of just very basic AV HWA, not all the 3D HW shining peaks whistles?)

[jernej]

18 hours ago, greenais said:

Hi @jernej could you elaborate perhaps what have been done on LibreELEC side to get hardware acceleration work on OPi3-LTS? Is it somehow related to v4l2_request module for VA drivers which was mentioned in several other treads elsewhere?

LE doesn't use VAAPI as it would be just extra complication where something could go wrong. At the time LE started supporting v4l2_request based drivers, v4l2 wasn't flexible enough to support VAAPI way of memory management, at least not in all cases. Instead, LE uses modified ffmpeg with native v4l2_request support, among some other modifications. Patches are available here. In some cases Kodi also need patches (for example, for HW deinterlacing.)

 

18 hours ago, greenais said:

To my point there is quite little we can expect here from Debian Panfrost guys, they clearly stated that HW acceleration is out of their focus at all (yet? for years already)

They are right, because Mali GPU has nothing to do with HW video decoding. It can be used for video rendering, but even that is done with DRM planes on LE, which is more performant in most (all?) cases. Allwinner SoCs use Cedrus core for video decoding. LE uses GPU only for GUI rendering.

[greenais]

On 12/20/2024 at 10:38 PM, jernej said:

because Mali GPU has nothing to do with HW video decoding

Thank you, first of all!
So you mean that even in vendor's preinstalled Android they don't use GPU for that?
I installed there VLC + couple of players from vanilla stores - all of them have no issues with HW decoding at all...

According to their status  Cedrus could be much easier way - VLC stated there as supported already

[jernej]

9 hours ago, greenais said:

So you mean that even in vendor's preinstalled Android they don't use GPU for that?

Even if this is now more than 10 years old, this is still mandatory read: https://www.cnx-software.com/2013/12/10/most-embedded-gpus-do-not-support-hardware-video-decoding-acceleration-the-vpu-does/

 

9 hours ago, greenais said:

I installed there VLC + couple of players from vanilla stores - all of them have no issues with HW decoding at all...

All of these players use Android API, so they don't need to care how HW video decoding is really done. Android is modified in a way to use Cedar core for that.

 

9 hours ago, greenais said:

According to their status  Cedrus could be much easier way - VLC stated there as supported already

libVA backend isn't maintained and LE doesn't use it. Latest kernel are not supported in that v4l2_request libVA port. For VLC and other players it would be easier to use it, but that's life...

 

There is more than enough information to figure out how this works, but granted, there is also a lot of obsolete information, so you have to figure how things work. Hint, VLC currently won't work with Cedrus.

[Nick A]

Hi Jernej.

I have some questions about allwinner H6 and h616 HW decoding. I searched around and found out the H6 SOC's have a second VPU that uses the hantro-vpu decoder for VP9. 

 

		video-codec-g2@1c00000 {
			compatible = "allwinner,sun50i-h6-vpu-g2";
			reg = <0x01c00000 0x1000>;
			interrupts = <GIC_SPI 90 IRQ_TYPE_LEVEL_HIGH>;
			clocks = <&ccu CLK_BUS_VP9>, <&ccu CLK_VP9>;
			clock-names = "bus", "mod";
			resets = <&ccu RST_BUS_VP9>;
			iommus = <&iommu 5>;
		};

 

I couldn't find these CLK_BUS_VP9 and CLK_VP9 clocks in the H616/618 manuals.

 

I guess allwinner took away this secondary vpu?

 

Do we need to patch cedrus to include VP9 support?

 

Trying to get HW decoding to work on chromium.

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 04:08 AM by Nick A

[jernej]

6 hours ago, Nick A said:

I guess allwinner took away this secondary vpu?

 

Do we need to patch cedrus to include VP9 support?

Yes, H616 Cedrus is capable of decoding VP9, but I'm not aware that anyone actually implemented support for it.