rockchip-vaapi Ver. 4.0.0 Number Nine "Pepper Pro" Video Driver Released With Custom MPP (RK3588)

Two releases are out for RK3588 / RK3588S boards running a Rockchip vendor (BSP) kernel. Not for mainline kernels.
 

rockchip-vaapi 4.0.0 "Pepper Pro" is the VA-API driver that lets Firefox, mpv, ffmpeg and VA-API builds of Chromium decode H.264, HEVC, VP9 and AV1 (8- and 10-bit) on the board's video engine, through Rockchip's MPP library. This release fixes H.264 and HEVC streams the hardware used to get wrong: custom quantisation tables (common in Blu-ray and broadcast encodes), interlaced H.264, some multi-slice and High 10 H.264, and HEVC streams with less common header layouts. Standard conformance streams decoded bit-exact on the hardware: H.264 74 → 111 of 135, H.264 High profiles 6 → 48 of 48, HEVC 17 → 141 of 147. Interlaced H.264 now comes out weaved; deinterlacing is up to the player (mpv --deinterlace=yes, in software). VP9 and AV1 are unchanged, except that an AV1 stream that grows mid-stream no longer crashes ffmpeg.

MPP +pd35 is an unofficial build of Rockchip's MPP with three fixes for RK3588: AV1 film grain applied by the hardware (new), VP9 on both decoder cores without the errors that started after about 65,000 frames (18 minutes at 60 fps), and 4K60 AV1 in Firefox keeping up (each picture decoded once, not twice).
 

Where it works
 

SoC: RK3588 and RK3588S. RK3576 untested (it has AV1 hardware, but this driver's AV1 path has only run on RK3588). RK356x untested, no AV1.
Kernel: vendor kernel with MPP; check with: ls /dev/mpp_service. Tested on Armbian's vendor branch (6.1.189-vendor-rk35xx); earlier releases also on ubuntu-rockchip 6.1.0-1027. Armbian current/edge (mainline) have no MPP, so the driver does not apply there.
Boards: Orange Pi 5B (all numbers above). Orange Pi 5 Plus confirmed by a forum tester on earlier releases. Other RK3588/RK3588S boards on a vendor kernel should work; reports welcome.
Distro: the driver package is built and tested on Ubuntu 26.04 and should install on 24.04 (not tested yet). It needs glibc 2.38 or newer, so not Ubuntu 22.04 or Debian 12; Debian 13 untested.
It also needs librockchip-mpp1 and librga2, which Ubuntu, Debian and Armbian's repository do not carry. On 24.04 they come from the rockchip-multimedia PPA (ppa:jjriek/rockchip-multimedia; Ubuntu-Rockchip images already have it, and adding it also replaces ffmpeg, GStreamer and mpv with its builds). Check with: apt-cache policy librockchip-mpp1 librga2
GPU: works with Arm's Mali driver, panfork Mesa, or Panthor.
4K needs more CMA memory: on Armbian add extraargs=cma=512M to /boot/armbianEnv.txt and reboot (check: grep CmaTotal /proc/meminfo).

Install
 

Driver: https://github.com/defcom5-rockchip/rockchip-vaapi/releases/tag/v4.0.0 then: sudo apt install ./rockchip-vaapi_4.0.0-1_arm64.deb (add --allow-change-held-packages if your image holds it). The package sets the VA-API environment for every user; log out and back in.
MPP: https://github.com/defcom5-rockchip/mpp/releases/tag/pd35 (files for 24.04 and 26.04, and how to go back). Optional if you already have MPP from the PPA, but the PPA build loses VP9 frames in long sessions, and 4K60 AV1 in Firefox needs this one.
Firefox needs three about:config settings, four for HEVC: https://github.com/defcom5-rockchip/rockchip-vaapi/blob/main/INSTALL.md . Chromium builds that decode through libv4l-rkmpp (some vendor images) do not use this driver; chrome://gpu shows which path you have.
Problems or reports from other boards: https://github.com/defcom5-rockchip/rockchip-vaapi/issues with board, uname -a, distro, apt-cache policy librockchip-mpp1, and the codec and resolution (full list in KNOWN-ISSUES.md, "Reporting").

The code was written and debugged with an AI assistant (Claude) under my direction, credited per commit. Every number above comes from runs on real hardware, kept in the repository's evidence/2026-10-25-* folders.

Edited October 26Oct 26 by defcom5-rockchip
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