Orange Pi 3 LTS video issues. Is it even worth it?

[Troy H]

I've had an Orange Pi 3 LTS for a couple of months now. I bought it for use as a home theater tv box. I thought I'd use the official orange pi ubuntu release, but it turned out to be really outdated and broken. So I have been trying to get Armbian to work.

 

After a lot of troubleshooting and time spent reading docs and forums, I can't get the thing to play video properly. It plays but is terrible quality and stutters constantly. I've determined that panfrost is working. In orangepi-config, under Hardware, it says the GPU is enabled. But when I run glmark2 I get a score of 100 or less no matter what I do. I've tried old builds of armbian for the pi 3 lts and they either wouldn't boot, don't have working wifi, or have the same video issue. I've tried running the build script myself but it has either failed or not produced a bootable build.

 

I would love to learn more about Armbian and SBCs and actually get this thing to work for video, but it is incredibly overwhelming.

Is this even worth my time to try to get working? I keep thinking there's just one setting I need to change, one driver I need to install, or something I'm missing, but I can't find it.

 

Should I just buy a different board? If so, which one in a similar price range would actually do what I'm looking for?

 

Thanks folks.