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 I thought I'd use the official orange pi ubuntu release, but it turned out to be really outdated and broken.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.

[greenais]

Have you solved the issue?
I bumped into same thing and my findings made me think of this approach.
Didn't you try it yet?

Originally I've got direction from this old post here.
 

Edited December 20 by greenais

[Troy H]

Unfortunately I never did find a solution. My orange pi 3 LTS has been sitting on a shelf until I can find another use for it. 

 

Best of luck finding something that works, and if you do please do share! 

[greenais]

Definitely I will - that's why we all are here.

[jernej]

@Troy H If you want mediacenter distro, you can try LibreELEC with Kodi. It has proper OPi3 LTS support (except wifi), but it might not be to your liking because it's single minded distro - no package manager to install extra software. If you decide to try it, I suggest latest nightly image (mind the date!) until 12.0.2 is out, as it has one important video rendering fix.

[kris777]

In my opinion, if someone is looking for the orangepi platform as an audio video player, it is better not to use the OrangePi3-LTS version. I searched the internet for some information about this model and I will honestly say that it is tragic 😞
I am currently using the above-mentioned Pi-3-LTS model as an internet radio and I will say that I managed to set almost everything correctly except for the I2S interface, which is why I could not connect the module: PCM5102 (DAC)
But you can easily use an audio card under USB and it is OK
also as a DAC (32bit). So as an internet radio, the OrangePi3-LTS is OK, if you could run I2S it would be PERFECT.....but this OrangePi model as an audio video player is currently and looking at the internet it is generally a bad solution, it is better to look for something else and preferably a model supported by Armbian developers! 🙂
I use the official OrangePi firmware version for internet radio, not Armbian! because on this old version almost everything works, including the I2C interface for LCD 16x2 / 40x2

Ps. How to configure such a radio I described a bit on the Polish Ubuntu forum ... but this is a tutorial in Polish 🙂

more information LINK LINK2

regards

Edited Sunday at 12:23 PM by kris777