deb2016 Posted February 1, 2016 Share Posted February 1, 2016 Hello, I have just bought a bananaPro. I would like to learn a little by installing armbian and enabling the video acceleration. Currently, I have no LCD display, so I would start to install Debian Wheezy or Debian Jessie (legacy) so that to be able to log in through ssh. Nevertheless, on the download page for bananaPro it is said that "Mali drivers fails to compile". Is this driver mandatory for video acceleration to work ? I figured out it was rather related to cedarX. Then, which armbian image is best suited ? Thanks in advance for some piece of advice. Best regards deb2016 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkaiser Posted February 1, 2016 Share Posted February 1, 2016 on the download page for bananaPro it is said that "Mali drivers fails to compile". Is this driver mandatory for video acceleration to work ? I figured out it was rather related to cedarX. Mali is one thing and CedarX another. But sometimes GPU acceleration is used to help with vertain aspects when missing full HW video acceleration. At the moment you won't be happy with Armbian for this purpose and the best you could try is this: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=254202&pid=2199415#pid2199415 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deb2016 Posted February 1, 2016 Author Share Posted February 1, 2016 Thanks for your reply. Is there really no option with armbian ? So far, I do not want a complete desktop, I just want to be able to launch mplayer or vlc or another video player without X. On my laptop, in a virtual terminal, I can do it like this : "mplayer -vo fbdev2 file.avi" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alexy314 Posted February 5, 2016 Share Posted February 5, 2016 Armbian ubuntu image has libvdpau-sunxi which enables HW-accel video playback. Although it has limited decode format support. See: http://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus#Supported_codec_matrix 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deb2016 Posted February 29, 2016 Author Share Posted February 29, 2016 Hello, I finally managed to make hardware video acceleration work on latest debian jessie (headless) armbian image. In short, steps were : 0) prepare the bananapro and the jessie image for video. 1) get a working Xorg saver using fbturbo driver with g2d enabled. 2) install libvdpau-sunxi from its source and its dependencies, from some repositories. 3) compile from source the latest mpv. Here is what I do : An hdmi screen is plugged to the bananapro which is itself connected directly to my laptop. The test console is visible on the screen. I log into the bananapro from my laptop through ssh. I run startx from there. You need to reconfigure x11-common because access to the X11 service is only accessible to console users. I then chose to grant access to everyone which is probably not good for security : better ideas are welcome ! The hdmi screen gets filled by the X11 server with a default application, builtin xterm I guess. Could be something else more useful, I do not know where to configure that. Check in the Xorg.0.log that fbturbo works with GED enabled. Then, login again through ssh into the bananapi, modify the DISPLAY variable to point to the local display (should be "export DISPLAY=:0"), then run "mpv --vo=vdpau --hwdec=vdpau --hwdec-codecs=all big_buck_bunny_1080p_H264_AAC_25fps_7200K.MP4 (put all these options in ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf) it should run smoothly on the hdmi screen. you can control the video (backward forward pause) from your laptop with the keyboard shortcut. when displaying the video : mpv takes 15-20% of the cpu power and X11 about the same. I do not know if this is good or bad ??? if it should be more or less. Want to adjust the sound ? Just login again through ssh, do not touch the DISPLAY for that time and launch your sound control application, e.g. pavucontrol for pulseaudio. As you did not touch the DISPLAY for that ssh session, the application window will be forwarded to your local laptop screen. For the moment, the only issue is that video are displayed a bit too darker . It is quite visible with the aformentioned test video. It is not a screen problem, the problem seems to be in mpv and/or libvdpau-sunxi although I cannot confirm it, I hope there is an mpv option to fix this (not investigated yet). As stated several times in many different places : no need to use the mali sunxi driver. I will try later if it compiles and if it brings something. When you start X11, the mouse is screen centered, there are some options in mpv to hide it, you may also use xdotool (on command line) to put it in one corner. Hopes this helps. I did not mention all steps in details, feel free to ask and comments are welcome. Best regards 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RagnerBG Posted February 29, 2016 Share Posted February 29, 2016 Why not just install mali driver along with other stuff and some lightweight desktop and don't bother with all those logins? It will not take too much resources, just some more packages. 15-20% from player and Xorg is what i got also, so i guess it's normal. Maybe Mplayer and VLC are couple of % down, but MPV offer the best image quality for my taste. More detailed and contrast picture, RGB colors, while VLC and Mplayer look more bright and YUV. About darken video i saw something similar with older Ubuntu desktop image of Armbian, with too old sunxi-vdpau library. With new ones image look normal to me. Maybe i will write some guide or something, if i have more time, with all players, codecs, drivers and so on, compilations. But i forgot how i manage to buld VLC and try to reproduce it with no luck today . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deb2016 Posted February 29, 2016 Author Share Posted February 29, 2016 Hello, For the darker image, I use the latest sunxi-vdpau library, but anyway it is easily fixed with -brightness=30 option of mpv. As for the lightweight desktop : how can I control it from my distant laptop ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RagnerBG Posted March 1, 2016 Share Posted March 1, 2016 As for the lightweight desktop : how can I control it from my distant laptop ? Sorry, i missed that part, where you want to control through remote terminal. I personally, use usb wireless keyboard+touchpad. But as far as i remember i was able to access X on device through remote terminal, by executing commands with " cat | " or something like this. I don't remember the exact command. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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