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.

[eselarm]

6 hours ago, Blind55 said:

the FriendlyElec (the vendor distro)? Or one of the 6.1 Armbian images?

My NanoPi-R6C came with FriendlyWRT pre-installed (OpenWRT variant) and I bought it 2 years ago partly also because I had a Samsumg 970 Evo NVME that needed a computer wrapped around it. I do not use images, instead root-filesystems (Btrfs). I Initially kept the FriendlyElec U-Boot, with all rest on NVME. Now still use the same principle, but EDK2-UEFI v1.1 as bootloader in eMMC and Armbian Trixie or Opensuse Tumbleweed with Armbian kernel and grub-efi. With latest u-boot (2026 rc2) I get no HDMI audio. I thought it was a power/reset issue, but also later tested again with complete un-powering first, but then also no HDMI audio. It might simply be a latency issue. Both older U-Boot and even much older FriendlyElec U-Boot as well as EDK2-UEFI initialize HDMI before the kernel and do simple 1080p60, so you also see the kernel being loaded, before KMS (re)-inits the HDMI. EDK2-UEFI has GUI for its settings, so no surprise it works there.

 

For Jellyfin, I currently use a ROCK5B Armbian Trixie with Armbian vendor 6.1.115 kernel (also EDK2-UEFI bootloader). There were some issue with Jellyfin strreaming/transcoding, also on N100, I currently don't know why/what. The jellyfin-ffmpeg via CLI works great though, so about 5x realtime transcoding HEVC->H264. But Firefox on N100 or x5-Z8350 uses HEVC HW decoder, so no real need to do transcoding for me.

 

LibreElec a month ago or so on NanoPi-R6C temporary booted from SD-card did do HW decoding OK, except for VP9 it was artifacts, not usable actually. So there is unfortunately no easy 1-size-fits-all currenlty. You can scan the forum, there are people who took unfinished patches and use very latest unstable Debian stuff, then things might work same as for x86.