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Help for testing? (T4 / Neo4)


mboehmer

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Hi guys,

 

just wanted to let you know that I have no a Nanopi Neo4 and NanoPC T4 here on my desk.

So if you need help in testing, please let me know.

 

If the Neo4 just had a little more RAM - it's a real cute board size, but hot without cooling unit :)

 

Michael

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On 11/17/2018 at 5:32 AM, mboehmer said:

So if you need help in testing, please let me know.

What help testing you need.

 

I received my M4 2 days ago but FiendishElec sent the wrong Aluminum cooling shield and until they send the right one, I only have very small Raspberry pi heat shields instead.

 

So without a heat shield The M4 with the latest Armbian gets hot quickly 75 - 80c

 

Observations so far.

 

6 Cores 4 small 2 Big is interesting. Htop shows how, they load up CPU load asymmetrically.

 

The C type USB port is really nice and a tight fit.

 

The M4 is really small and it feels it would break easily.

 

The armbian image for Ubuntu is good and complete.

 

Sound came out of my HDMI connected TV fine.

 

The little Bluetooth and 5 GHz Wifi antennas I assumed were Identical and I just put one on the Bluetooth connector and one on the wifi connector. 5 Ghz Wifi connected straight away. File transfers to my NAS were about 8GB a second twice the speed compared  to transferring over 2.4Ghz wifi.

 

Movie playing 720p HEVC movie is about 40% CPU load. Very Very acceptable.

 

Sometimes the OS jams up but this might be heat or not enough power coming through C connector.

 

I guess my feeling is I am slightly underwhelmed for a $90(including shipping) Computer.

 

I have a $35 (including shipping) 1 GB ram Octacore Mecool KM8  s912 running Armbian by Babes . My gut feel is that the early Armbian OS on the RK3399 is about 20% faster than the much more optimized S912 Armbian  OS at this stage.

 

If I was starting from scratch I would just buy the $35 Mecool s912 Octacore and run the Armbian OS for S912. And wait for the RK3399 to get cheaper and better.

 

 

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18 hours ago, Seasalt said:

What help testing you need.

 

I received my M4 2 days ago but FiendishElec sent the wrong Aluminum cooling shield and until they send the right one, I only have very small Raspberry pi heat shields instead.

 

So without a heat shield The M4 with the latest Armbian gets hot quickly 75 - 80c

 

Observations so far.

 

6 Cores 4 small 2 Big is interesting. Htop shows how, they load up CPU load asymmetrically.

 

The C type USB port is really nice and a tight fit.

 

The M4 is really small and it feels it would break easily.

 

The armbian image for Ubuntu is good and complete.

 

Sound came out of my HDMI connected TV fine.

 

The little Bluetooth and 5 GHz Wifi antennas I assumed were Identical and I just put one on the Bluetooth connector and one on the wifi connector. 5 Ghz Wifi connected straight away. File transfers to my NAS were about 8GB a second twice the speed compared  to transferring over 2.4Ghz wifi.

 

Movie playing 720p HEVC movie is about 40% CPU load. Very Very acceptable.

 

Sometimes the OS jams up but this might be heat or not enough power coming through C connector.

 

I guess my feeling is I am slightly underwhelmed for a $90(including shipping) Computer.

 

I have a $35 (including shipping) 1 GB ram Octacore Mecool KM8  s912 running Armbian by Babes . My gut feel is that the early Armbian OS on the RK3399 is about 20% faster than the much more optimized S912 Armbian  OS at this stage.

 

If I was starting from scratch I would just buy the $35 Mecool s912 Octacore and run the Armbian OS for S912. And wait for the RK3399 to get cheaper and better.

 

 

 Think the only problem i am finding with my m4 atm is youtube playback at 1080 in theory it should be able to do it looking at the chip (VP9 : 2160p@60fps(4096x2304)) but again its down to software etc using those hardware features. But apart from that i am using my m4 as an actual pc with armbian works very well.

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My problem with the NanoPC-T4 is frrienlyarm is anything but.  

 

The vpu / mpp hardware isnt truly open.  I want to rebuild ffmpeg and gstreamer to support hardware video decoding. I built mpp and the rockchip gstreamer plugins  mpp has a bug... And gst123 displays it.  Video frames play too fast, mkv video out of sync. DRI 2 support is broken so I am using fbdev.   Rockchip git repos don't have all the source needed. ARM doesent help matters any. The DDX should be GPL2.  

 

I built plemediaplayer... But it's not suitable to replace my old Nvidia shield.  1080p plays too fast with MPP, and it's a slide show with vdpau-gl on Wayland.  

 

Need the hardware video encoder and decoder for a plexmedia server / player

That can replace an Nvidia shield.

 

At the moment the nanopcT4 is not worth $45.00 USD nevermind $109.00

Rockchip and Armbian needs to release the source so we can fix..

 

If anyone here is new to Armbian I have to say the NanoPCT4 support from friendlyarm stinks.  Vpu and GPU support is guarded. I verified drive egl x11 is slower than Armbian fbdev 

 

Hopefully we can get a fixed version of mpp.  I can rebuild ffmpeg gstreamer and mpv.

 

At this time I have to say the NanoPCT4 is not a suitable media desktop device.

 

4k support, yeah right.  It s bull.

Save yourself the trouble. Don't buy this board until rockchip fixes thier GitHub source

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2 hours ago, jerryn said:

Need the hardware video encoder and decoder for a plexmedia server / player

That can replace an Nvidia shield.

There is no SBC that can do what an NVidia Shield can. Those cost $200 and have one of the biggest companies behind it. No SBC maker can put so much resources into it.

I do agree that a lot must improve. And I'm sure this will improve. 
But my experiences with many/most other boards are a lot worse than with the RK3399 boards.

With Firefox you can watch 1080p video, but surfing is better with Vivaldi browser.
There are different video players that work fine.
With this you should be able to watch 4K in Linux. I haven't tried it yet,
gst-launch-1.0 uridecodebin uri=file:///usr/local/test.mp4  ! rkximagesink

Although I hate it, but Android does a good job with media, but as desktop it's awful.
I use my M4 as 2nd desktop and I'm able to do everything I need, but it's still not perfect;

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If Rockchip made all the source available so we can create a proper vdpu , vaapi , drive kernel modules , libraries, and gstreamer plugins.

 

I would gladly contribute the Deb package and source to Armbian when done 

 

Friendly arm claimed the board can do 4k video...  Not 4k slideshow 

 

I will configure my development package with all the proper use , Mali ddx blobs,  mmp, rockchip gstreamer plugins,. I will post it on my Google drive and share it.

 

It's too bad that rockchip isso guarded with the vpu code.  

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3 hours ago, vlad59 said:

Rockchip need to release the source, Armbian may use it afterwards

Yes.. How to we get Rockchip to improve their OpenSource support.  I'd gladly help build deb packages and get  VPU support in Armbian

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3 hours ago, NicoD said:

There is no SBC that can do what an NVidia Shield can

I'll try to shoot a video and post it of what the NanoPC-T4 can stream with the FriendlyARM Oreo 8.0 image.    The rat bastards at friendly arm are not releasing the entire source.  Other individuals downloaded the source and attempted to make their custom kernel and image.  FriendlyARM and Rockchip are not publishing all the code.   

I don't want to run android.   I want to get the VPU working because that's how hardware acceleration is important.  I also want to port my SLAM navigation code from my Tinkerboard  based robot to

the NanoPC-T4.     I need OpenCV with full accelaration, also I use VAAPI for video.  I figured I'd take advantage of the battery backed RTC and allow  the robot to sleep while charging and wake at 

at a set time.     The hardware is great,  the published software, no.    I will boot the board up with Android 8.0,  stream a video from my Plex Server at 1080p.  I'll show how it works.

I built plexmediaplayer for Armbian.   I have some hardware MPP support build, rockchip plugins working in Armbian, but MPP is not ready at all. It's buggy, video frames are too fast, audio out of sync by 1 second.

 

The main issue is we don't have proper T860 GPU and VPU support from Rockchip.  Panfrost is far from being "ready"  I downloaded it and tried it.  Also it does not cover VPU support.

 

 

 

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59 minutes ago, jerryn said:

 I want to get the VPU working because that's how hardware acceleration is important.

I hope you`ll get somewhere. It would be good for everybody. I`ve got multiple RK3399 boards, I want them to do well. But for what I need they`re already the best(video editing, desktop use, arduino programming, ...)
A bit a pitty there`s not more effort from the SoC makers. But they do what earns them money. Linux use on these chips is only a small portion of the use. So many don`t care much.
Thank god for Armbian, a great job in making these boards usefull for everybody.

All I can find are these documents. Maybe you`ve missed something.
https://lwn.net/Articles/765312/
http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_RK3399
https://patchwork.kernel.org/cover/10584089/
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/kernel/+/chromeos-4.4/drivers/media/platform/rockchip-vpu/
https://github.com/rockchip-linux/mpp
https://github.com/rockchip-linux/video
https://github.com/rockchip-linux/rk-qt-video
 

If you find anything, please let us know. It would be great.
I`m not skilled enough to do the work. I used to be a programmer in an earlier life. Worked from my 15th till 19 as programmer in a big speech recognition company. But it all went broke, I lost my job, no school degree and thousands other jobless programmers... So I lost interest.
20 years later I regret not keeping up. With Linux I can`t seem to get an insight.
I love Linux, and don`t like Windows. But at least Windows is super easy to program for. Cheers

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Have you tried it with Firefox, just drag the video file into firefox. My 1080p videos all run fine with that.
Also vlc and smplayer do well for me. It depends on file type too. You have to configure the video driver
4k is only about 4fps, but 1080p plays great with me.
Maybe if you have a 4k display, put it in 1080p. 4k eats a lot resources.
I only have 1080p displays, so I have no experience with 4k.

38 minutes ago, jerryn said:

Here's the video of the NanoPC-T4 Plex Media Player  1080p   Android 8.0   I want to run Linux, not android.   Also the android image has it's own UI bugs.  

Here`s how I`m able to play 1080p files. There are others that work, baven`t tried them alll.

VLC-> tools -> preferences -> Video -> Output -> x11 video output
 SMPlayer -> Options -> preferences -> video -> Output Driver -> choose X11

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I don't own a 4k display.. LMAO.  I've got a 2k Display for my Desktop Computer.  It's a Intel NUC Hades Canyon running Ubuntu Bionic Beaver.  The TV is 1080p.   My  NVIDIA Shield had a USB Interface failure, now it has memory issues.   It performed well 3 years ago when I got it but I think it's not made to last.

RoHS solder is terrible.  When I build projects I use the old school 60/40 solder and a fan to blow the rosin away from my face.     The NanoPC-T4 is going to be used to replace the NVIDIA Shield.  

 

PlexMedia Player uses mpv.   It looks like x11/xcb might work.    I will try to fix mpp too.  If I fix mpp I'll package it up and uploaded it to the forum.

 

Thanks a lot for your help.

 

 

 

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6 hours ago, jerryn said:

The rat bastards at friendly arm are not releasing the entire source. 

 

You can skip board makers from this. They would like to give you full blown Linux supported distro, but they can't deliver that. Rockchip is little more to blame if anyone. They were promising 3399 opensourceness and they are trying but they also can't do this alone. Linux is a community project per se. It's too big task for a few engineers which are working on Linux kernel. Their main focus is providing Android which nobody cares if it is not open source.

 

3399 is actually very well supported if you compare to other chips and it takes time that all boards features works at their maximum performance. Video acceleration is a complex hack and in some/most cases support is done via closed library. Since you are mentioning Nvidia: 
 

 

Without community work, you could only "enjoy" crippled buggy "deploy and forget" images (not a Linux distribution) that come from the board maker's labs and community repackers. FriendlyARM's work support is actually good, one of the best in the industry. They can't support end users - we also can't - except "as is" on forum. If you would send me a technical question an email/PM, you will most likely not get an answer. I stopped doing that, because day has only 24h hours and there is a huge list of people and even bigger list of problems. Most of people mix free software with free work and don't even think that they have to refund for the time wasted ... or risk to receive the same answer as Torvalds gave to Nvidia :P

 

Board makers can't provide top shit Linux and don't even try. They would close their company very quickly if they would try to do that. Cost of software support is magnitude higher then making hardware. We at least try improving despite its economically unjustifiable. If this take years, so be it. 

Allwinner case - at the end, this is how things are done - we pay and we done. 3rd party kernel hackers company raising money and putting professionals for certain amount of time on the project to push hardest things forward in truly Opensource way. This is just a help to already vibrant community.  You still need to solve all the dependencies and implement the solution.
 

 

6 hours ago, jerryn said:

I'd gladly help build deb packages and get  VPU support in Armbian


I am not dealing much in this area so I don't know how good or bad the situation is with the RK3399. This is how we done it for older RK's - it's community addition, which is at some point hopefully integrated into Armbian. Even that is hard since we extremely lack people/resources to maintain this project and cope with a 1000+ wishes which are regularly on the list.

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Igor, I have a plan.

 

I will rework the kmpp module. rebuild ffmpeg and mpv with kmpp support.  I am looking at methods to fix the video playrate issue 

 

Once I have video playback working with hardware accelleration I will upload the binary and source Deb packages.

 

I never even thought the issue was Armbian Support. No.. everyone here is very helpful. It is all Rockchip fault.

I have some Asian friends.

I know they turn beet red after a few drinks and I wouldn't put it past rockchip that the poor vpu support is

Because they are trying to get a large share of and control of  the cheap TV box market.  

Reverse engineering takes longer... Vpu will be working soon

 

Thanks

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20 hours ago, Igor said:

Allwinner case - at the end, this is how things are done - we pay and we done

Igor thanks for the long answer it makes many issues related to Video processing Hardware on Arm board clearer.

 

But I still have some things I do not understand.

 

Is it Arm or Rockchip who is not releasing the opensource video display driver information.

 

Are they releasing a fully working ANDROID Video driver but not releasing a fully working Opensource Video driver for LINUX?

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Armbian has decent performance with x11/fbdev.    The Hardware Video decoder is not as robust as the software decoders in ffmpeg.  I built mpv with rockchip hardware acceleration.  I was dissapointed with the outcome.   No colorspace conversion support for my mkv files.  mpv with x11/fbdev software rendering works.

 

Here''s what was required for x11 fbdev not to drop frames:

  mpv::qt::set_property(m_mpv, "xv-buffers", "5");

 

NanoPC-T4 Plex Media Player playing HD Video (modified code to use x11 fbdev and set xf-buffers to 5)!  

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