Need help with video decode acceleration on NanoPi R6S

[Blind55]

I have been pulling my hair out trying to get the acceleration performance (smooth 4K video playback in mpv / chromium) in Armbian (any of the MESA/VPU marked releases) that I am getting from the FriendlyElec distributions. In my naive mind, I thought the MESA/VPU version would get me there, but mpv stutters on 4K videos. I suspect this is because Armbian avoids the proprietary drives. A long time ago, Armbian Ubuntu versions were able to be 'amended' with the Amazingfate/liujianfeng1994 repository, but I have not been able to make that work in a while.

Could someone point me to a guide that allows me to get similar performance with Armbian as I am getting with FriendlyElec?

Thanks bunch in advance!

[Werner]

Providing logs with 

armbianmonitor -u

 helps with troubleshooting and significantly raises chances that issue gets addressed.

[Dantes]

Or wait until the end of the year when 6.18 will be the new Linux version, that enables pretty much everything.

 

RK3588 Mainline Linux Status:

• https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3588/-/blob/main/mainline-status.md

 

If you really need a bleeding edge working mediaplayer, LibreElec has experimental support for R6S/R6C:

• Thread: https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/29953-le13-testing-for-rk3288-rk3328-rk3399-rk3566-rk3568-rk3576-rk3588/
• Downloads: https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/

 

Edited September 7 by Dantes

[Blind55]

Thank you, everyone, for the suggestions. After having been absent here for a while, I am going to try Dante's suggestion first.

 

Thanks again!

[Blind55]

Update

 

1. The LibreElec solution that Dante suggested works very well, if the only thing that is wanted is the video acceleration and kodi. Unfortunately, if one wanted to also add a Jellyfin server on the Nanopi R6S (which works well with video acceleration), then LibreElec is an issue because it won't allow installing that software. Nonetheless, right now, it appears to be the only option besides FriendlyElec.

 

2. The Armbian solution does not allow for stutterless playback of 2160 videos for some reason. Please see the logs below:

https://paste.armbian.com/akudoyopas

 

In general, I would much prefer a solution with Armbian which would allow a lot more flexibility with my setup.

[eselarm]

Mainline 6.18 or 6.19 does only decoding accelerated, not encoding (yet) what is to great benefit of Jellyfin. Also for that transcoding, Jellyfin uses RKMPP, not V4l2. So 6.1.115 vendor kernel is what I use on the Jellyfin server (headless). For desktop RK3588, I use mainline 6.18.2 at the moment, brute force SW decoding, that works for me as content is max 1080p60 (HEVC or VP9 or H264).

 

[Blind55]

@eselarm, thank you for your thoughts. So, just for clarification: for the Jellyfin server, do you use the FriendlyElec (the vendor distro)? Or one of the 6.1 Armbian images?

With the Ubuntu rolling release I can stream in a browser with software decoding ok (although I am not getting sound rn). I will work some more on it and report back.