Alex Bueno Posted November 29, 2017 Posted November 29, 2017 Hi everyone! Firstly sorry if this question is too basic or already had a solution in other topic, but I couldn't found the answer I'm looking for and I'm new to Armbian. But let's go... We have a standalone system here that plays videos all day long. That kind of "internal TV" from the company, where they put news and other things someone judge it's interesting. It works pretty well so far for roundly 10 years. Thing is: it relies on regular PCs! As you may know, they're big and has bigger energy consumption than this amazing TV Box. During a meeting someone came up with the idea of replacing it for something smaller, like this Intel NUC, but they're quite expensive in here. Then I came up the solution of using this TV Box! They're just perfect for the "system" (not really a system, almost just mplayer playing in loop a folder with few videos) we have, since the actual runs on Debian and the TV Box is capable of running armbian that'll run same other scripts (sync files, cron, etc) on the fly. Now guess what? I was elected the guy for the job! I wonder why they gave this job for a network admin. Because of my big mouth or because I developed the other one Running armbian is pretty damn easy, but mplayer is not the good guy for the job anymore. I'm having some success with mpv. (currently running without interface, just console) First problem: All the current content is already in 720p, resolution is 1080p and when I run "mpv -fs" there's a lot of freezing. Without -fs runs almost smoothly. Since all of the content is generated internally, I convinced everyone to create videos in 1080p. Now I have fullscreen without -fs and running almost smoothly. Second problem: because there's a few freezing (seems like the TV Box is not capable of processing all the frames), some guys aren't accepting it. At certain level I indeed agree, since with Android it seems to run 100% smoothly. I've read something about hardware acceleration, but I have no idea how to enable it, or check if it's enabled. With all this said, I come to my question: What would be the best video format (codecs) to play on S905X and the better player to use? Thanks guys!
Tido Posted November 30, 2017 Posted November 30, 2017 Hi, Reading your description sounds to me like a digital signage display (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signage). We have Intel NUC running for that purpose, but beside the price (we took the cheapest) it has a fan - that can break. The Zotac ZBOX CI323 NANO is a better fit (no fan), but the Atom CPU design (Intel Celeron N3150) wasn't well supported for Linux Red Hat Enterprise at that time or just to weak HW. For your ARM box you will have to use the old 3.4.x Kernel to get proper VPU support (http://linux-sunxi.org/Video_Engine). Beside that we also found out in our test back in 2016 that 1080 is not the only factor that count - Video Stream can bring more or less data depending on the coding used. Tido
Alex Bueno Posted November 30, 2017 Author Posted November 30, 2017 4 hours ago, Tido said: Hi, Reading your description sounds to me like a digital signage display (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signage). We have Intel NUC running for that purpose, but beside the price (we took the cheapest) it has a fan - that can break. The Zotac ZBOX CI323 NANO is a better fit (no fan), but the Atom CPU design (Intel Celeron N3150) wasn't well supported for Linux Red Hat Enterprise at that time or just to weak HW. For your ARM box you will have to use the old 3.4.x Kernel to get proper VPU support (http://linux-sunxi.org/Video_Engine). Beside that we also found out in our test back in 2016 that 1080 is not the only factor that count - Video Stream can bring more or less data depending on the coding used. Tido Hi Tido! I didn't even know that there was a name for that! Well, I have (for my own use) an Intel NUC and I bought the cheapest one, Celeron without fan, it cost almost 7 times the price of a TV Box in here. Zotac? No.. it haven't arrived here yet! Where can I get an image with old kernel? Thanks!
Tido Posted November 30, 2017 Posted November 30, 2017 because you have an Amlogic S905X - I recommend you to got to this Thread and use the search-function (right corner, on top) choose 'This Topic' or the 'advanced search' and look for your problem eg. 1080, h264 or such. By the way, as you look for a tool to do the job, what is wrong with Android for your scenario?
Tido Posted December 5, 2017 Posted December 5, 2017 Raspberry Pi 3 Compute Module (NEC Edition) extended onboard memory of 16 GB, a Watch Dog Timer and a Real Time Clock as well as pre-loaded licences for video decoding to meet the particular demands of professional signage applications. NEC is proud to announce that our MultiSync V Series Large Format Displays featuring embedded Raspberry Pi computing has been nominated for an award in the Display Technology for Digital Signage category. Unless armbian has a stable channel for an e.g. a A20 & a H3 (one board each) I guess the NEC solution is the safer path.
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