h264 encoding on H6 (orange pi one plus)

[aik]

I have one on a shelf and want to use it for h265->h264 transcoding. http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/details/Orange-Pi-One-Plus.html says it can.

H6 Quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex™-A53

Decoding: H265/HEVC Main/Main10 profile@Level5.2 High-tier ;4K@60fps, up to 6Kx4K@30fps

Encoding: H.264 BP/MP/HP encoder up to 4K@25fps or 1080p@60fps

 

Googling finds some old branches of ffmpeg and kernel for H3.

Current armbian 25.2.3 comes with 6.12.20-current-sunxi64 which has:

sunxi_cedrus

v4l2_mem2mem          
videobuf2_dma_contig  
videobuf2_v4l2        
videodev              
videobuf2_common      
mc                    
so the kernel seems to be aware of my specific chip (hence sunxi_cedrus) and modern Kodi seems to support decoding but nothing about encoding.

 

Is that it, encoding is just not supported and my Pi is only good as a player?

 

ps. sadly there is no One Plus specific forum and no common Sunxi forum and for some reason I must choose one of the boards and hence Quadra which seems using H6.

[eselarm]

1 hour ago, aik said:

so the kernel seems to be aware of my specific chip (hence sunxi_cedrus) and modern Kodi seems to support decoding but nothing about encoding.

 

Is that it, encoding is just not supported and my Pi is only good as a player?

 

ps. sadly there is no One Plus specific forum and no common Sunxi forum and for some reason I must choose one of the boards and hence Quadra which seems using H6

If Allwinner does not provide C-source code (kernel, libs, ffmpeg, etc) for recent Linux, I consider it as is; no encoding on Allwinner SoCs. I have several H3 boards, I also dreamed that I once maybe could use that for HEVC->H264 transcoding (low power 24/7 multiple TV channels) but it is not happening. I spent a lot of time to get it working on Pi4 and that breaks at various distro updates or just kernel updates. But RPL then hacks/fixes it in their custom ffmpeg, but it is only Pi4 and also limited, Pi5 has no HW encoding so even they as biggest SBC company give up on it I would say. Rockchip and Intel have fairly easy out-of-the-box solutions, but both not V4L2m2m.

[aik]

Well, folks say it is being worked on - https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=71025ec7f7767

Decoding works so I was hoping it did progress but may be not.