I spent a few hours trying to get hw accel working: https://github.com/rockchip-linux/mpp
Installed correctly. http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Mpp
gstreamer with ubuntu 16.04 is 1.8 and this requires 1.12 or greater so it was a bust. I tried compiling gstreamer from source but wasn't able to figure out how to install it without breaking all the packages already installed. I think the best solution is to just wait for a 18.04 distro to be released. From what I can tell, this will allow for the elusive hardware acceleration. Seems pretty achievable - ie already done.
Yea. This is basically what I found too but firefly will have a huge task getting ubuntu 18.04 to work. They modified xorg to include HW acceleration. There is a huge reason why no one should do this. If the underlying code changes, integrating changes from a project as complex as xorg can be quite a challenge.
I actually managed to get GStreamer 1.14 building but it didn't help. The libdrm and the libmali drivers didn't work properly for this board. I think you are right about the rpi 4. GStreamer is a very complicated application and they actually recommend not building it from scratch as it is too difficult for most people. You might be able to get it to build but it took me a few hours and I still missed dependencies. It really requires a dedicated build box, possibly only for building GStreamer, like in a VM.
What I would really hope is that firefly can get a default xorg working, link up their drm and mali drivers, submit them to the upstream kernel team, and shove all graphics onto the hardware.
It also looks like that firefly put out a newer chip faster than they could come up with the software to make it work, which is a shame. I understand the desire to put out something incredible before other people but they hurt themselves by not having video work. I also think they made a huge mistake selling this as having native 4k support or even 1080p while obviously not. The fact that a developer got a stream to work using h265 for a test stream in a demo does not mean VLC or GStreamer will playback video. If firefly was very smart, they would drop GStreamer and focus on porting omxplayer to make the transition easier from a raspberry pi.
As I offered before, if firefly would like help getting the drm and mali stuff working, please create a git readme and a set of bug fixes and a set of tasks, put it up online, and allow the community to hack on it for a while. I am more than happy to help develop for this board but I would need a place to start.
@bholland firefly posted this a few days ago, The kernel code of Firefly ROC-RK3328-CC has been officially approved by kernel.org. The related BSP support has been added to Linux Kernel 4.17 version.
You can download the code directly from the kernel.org official website, use the configuration of Linux kernel to compile ROC-RK3328-CC, to get the native Linux operating system.
i'm not a dev so don't know if this is a step forward, firefly posted another 16.04 build
that's hard to download and doesn't boot I wish they would post what changes are when they post new builds,
@bholland Most of the work can only be done by Rockchip. Linux video pipeline is incredibly immature for ARM based systems. It doesn't even work reliably on x86 systems and is usually masked by good CPU software decoders. There's multiple competing APIs and browsers like Chromium and Firefox don't bother to support hardware video acceleration on Linux due to the lack of clarity. You have V4L2 M2M, VAAPI, VDPAU, and numerous proprietary APIs for specific chips. It not as straight forward and easy.
Haha thank you loverpi. I've known this for awhile but it's refreshing to remind Linux noobs of this. Look guys, it's open source software that is built but volunteers mostly. So it's vital for people to roll up their sleeves and help code and stop bitching so much about what does or doesn't work perfectly for them. If you can't help then just deal with it, it's free software after all. It's not like you had to buy a copy like windows.
And I work mostly with BSD on my other machines and in the BSD world, when something doesn't work the way you want it, you get some smarts and fix it yourself. Half these guys probably can't figure out the command line or how to use a terminal. Oh and btw i got the 4/04 ubuntu image working perfectly fine with tear-free video, smooth graphics, music and some* video games. So you all suck at computing.
Hey Freedman, some of us don't code and can still use the command line.
Not everyone is a programmer and can't contribute in that way.
If you have a working image, why not share it with the rest of us noobs instead of being kind of a d#@k about it.
Just because we buy a computer offered to work with advertised specs and it doesn't perform doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't complain. Sure the OS is free but it's not doing as advertized and we all understand we need to wait for someone smarter than most of us who understands how the hardware works and can code to do the work.
I personally check here almost every day for the hope someone figured it out and can give step by step instructions, maybe with explinations so we can all "get smarter" on how things work and why you use certain command lines (What they do)
To ask someone with no programming ability to just go get smarts and just "work it out" is counter productive and frankly, unreasonable.
It would take many years of study to gain these skills from scratch, especially on your own with a handful of unhelpful people telling you you're a noob and too stupid.
How about helping the community out if you're so smart. I'm sure loverpi and the other FireFly members would appreciate the help so they don't have to work it out and can just release the image.
What a crap thing to say. Seriously, lift your game.
Oh no, I used the regular image, I just know how to fine-tune linux to do whatever I want it to. Did you even look under the hood to see what you could do? When was the last time you even read a man page? Have you gone on the Ubuntu wiki, Debian wiki or Arch wiki and read any articles or guides for lightweight window manager/speed/optimization/power consumption? Did you know it works much better if you plug it into a regular computer monitor and not a flatscreen TV because the high resolution is heavier on the CPU/GPU? I did share some basic things in my retro-gamers post. But it sounds like I stuck a nerve with you so if the shoe fits wear it ;-) My game is lifted, my board works and yours apparently doesn't. Don't blame the machine it's the user. And yes, it does take time to learn, but isn't that why we bought SOC boards w/ a next gen chip in the first place? I'm confused about your stance here. I sure Best Buy has plenty of HP laptops with Windows 10 that would be better suited for you.
That's what I thought.
You're all talk and actually have nothing useful at all to actually offer the community.
That wasn't a hard guess though, honestly ;-)
It looks as though someone didn't read themselves, did they.
The topic, is about hardware acceleration for video playback in browsers and media players.
The video hardware is not properly implemented yet for assisted decodes, only you seem to be able to get it going it seems. This topic has everything to do with high resoulution and 4k decodes.
Your game is far, far from lifted because, you're just not a very good human yet.
Go work on your people skills.
Uh, that is strange because video decoding does work, it's just an code immature sub-system like the dev said. But my point was that you can help code to fix the DRM stack and/or you can improve performance including video performance based on your system administration and tuning. This is why we use Linux or BSD in the first place, the near infinite tuning options in our software that doesn't exist in non-free OS's like Android, Windows or OSX. My wife says I need to be nicer to people, so I'll put it on my list to post a guide on how to fine-tune the lastest image (probably the debian 5/28) into a speed machine that's basically as fast as a laptop, for the most part (I know the current state of rockchip linux is imperfect and incomplete and I'm totally aware of that). It will be a suckless tools setup too, it's perfect for that board.
Your wife sounds like a very smart woman.
This is exactly why Linus states why Linux has failed to break into the mainstream.
People do it for themselves, get it half working and no one benifits except them.
Some of us are not programmers.
We don't have the hardware specs and years to train our minds on understanding the code required.
We come to forums for help and instruction to learn and fix our issues, then we meet someone like you and that's why these computers never take off and its "off to best buy."
Ok, that's a bit harsh, but it sure puts a bump in the road of learning.
I appolgise somewhat however, all you did was jump in and belittle eveyone here in the most inconstructive way, calling them stupid, work it out for yourself, read a man page and you'll get it working, I mean really? you think the people who designed this computer didn't do that themselves with more knowlege than most of us?
As you said, there are substantial improvments to be made in the code subsystem/api to get the GPU working properly. If you're so damm good, teach us!
Offer guides, show us how to do the things to get the computer out and away from windows 10 and best buy.
Contribute to humnanity and Linux in general.
A man page a day is not going to make this issue go away.
You sound as though you could contribute so, contribute!
FireFly sure could use the help and after your last letter, maybe there is hope for someone like youreself as a person too. Even becoming a really useful mentor to people and who knows, making the entire race smarter in at least this instance.
Okay okay, you've warmed my cold heart. I'm sorry, at first I was only teasing and that guy took it so personally that I turned up the heat on him unnecessarily. You are all right, I do have shitty social skills (that's why I love computers). And I'm a line cook, in a industry of assholes, so I come off as one too easily. Once again I apologize, the last thing I would ever want to do is take away from or disparage this community, give me a month and I'll post some guides (sorry busy schedule and I want to make sure I give you guys some quality stuff). My wife wants me to do a youtube channel where I teach people how to build lightweight linux/bsd systems and make them highly functional. The only problem is when people make mistakes based on information from me (i give guidelines but I'm no replacement for official docs) and they go to complain to to devs or forums, usually the hatred will be thrown back at me cause I making users lazy by giving them a cheap alternative to actually doing their homework and reading the documentation. Post a problem and say I followed xyz in freedman's youtube video and watch fire and pitchforks rise. You be surprised by some of the BSD/Arch Linux forums, those old unix-beards are grumps and they very little patience for noobs. So I have to find a balance to make it please both sides somehow.
That begs another question if the ROC-3328-CC can handle ffmpeg screencasting without the video being too choppy, I could do live videos from the device.
Well, far out. Your job sounds horrible.
Maybe you could make money doing your Youtube guides idea and get out of that line cook stuff.
That's not what humanity should be about. That area obviously needs severe improvment by a lot of us (humanity).
I'm really, really glad I warmed your heart. The world is shit enough (as you have clearly illustrated)
Less noob, more Linux. I'm looking forward to that. No more Windows, no more best buy.
Yep, i'm good with that.
The latest images with LXDE and Android both have hardware accelerated video and 3D working properly. However, it doesn't work on all apps since most apps don't support gstreamer directly.
Unfortunately I had to jump ship for a platform that would do the job I needed. The rock64 board has hardware decoding working and can stream 1080p flawlessly. I don't have any 4k screens to test it with, but I'm told it works fine. I think part of the problem here is the old linux images, but I haven't built a linux kernel in over 20 years, so I'm of no use.
Fantastic news. I will have a look. Is this the Armbian image? Android is not going to work for me, it's too unfriendly and locked down. I need Ubuntu Linux for daily use.
*edit nevermind, i'll download and try out whatever is there.
Freedman, send us your YouTube link (When you are ready) I'll subscribe for sure.
I obviously have a lot of Linux to learn. ;-)
I installed the new ROC-RK3328-CC-ubuntu18.04-LXDE_20180605
It is installed and working however, the included Chrome browser acceleration seems stuck in low-resolution and CPU at 100% on all 4 cores running 720 or above. I am yet to try firefox as it's not yet installed so I guess, not gstreamer compatible?
I guess i'll have to wait for ffmpeg to be added to compatibility. This is what I have seen on Google posts about Chrome thus far.
My next step is to move over to BTRFS from ext4 as everything I am reading, it causes less wear on flash drives than the journaling versions like ext4 and it also uses crc checking on files which would be good to track any corruption.
I'm still noobish so, we will see how far I get.
@loverpi
What player uses gstreamer?
I am trying 4k content and 1080p video from sampler sites in VLC and clearly, that doesn't support it.
I then tried Videos/Totem and Parole (Which are based on gstreamer according to the software packager and google) and these also failed to playback fluently.
I don't suppose there is a recommended desktop manager for
Armbian_5.46_Roc-rk3328-cc_Ubuntu_xenial_defaul..> 31-May-2018 02:53 is there?
The http://www.mediafire.com/folder/gamc1a392s3mb/Ubuntu page is down. Actually, all the image links are down.
Hello everybody and many, many thanks to @shades_aus for this thread and his comments: I find myself in almost the exact same situation and I found his comments and shares very useful.
Or is it better the "ROC-RK3328-CC_Ubuntu18.04_LXDE_20180717.img.xz" available here: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/gamc1a392s3mb/Ubuntu ? BTW, I noticed that there's no md5sum for such a file (as opposed to the other two images at the same path). But more important: what's the difference between this 20180717 image w.r.t. the 20180605 one? And what's the difference between the tgz and the img.xz files?
@loverpi said:
This is awaiting Rockchip. There's some GBM work still to be completed for mainline. After that, there's a lot of work for Wayland and V4L2 and Chromium to support V4L2 that has to be completed. Expect this to be completed at year end at the earliest.
@loverpi just curious if there are any newer details, or a more certain timetable available? It looks like quite a few people are interested (based on the view-count this is the third most popular post in the ROC-RK3328-CC category), and I'd count myself as part of that number. Any information you can provide is much appreciated.
RK3328 will probably be the last one to get video acceleration let alone video acceleration in chrome. The first platform to get acceleration is S905X. The second is H3/H5. Libre Computer is paying for the work to upstream those. Rockchip isn't investing much in RK3328. HDMI doesn't even work in mainline right now. Libre Computer doesn't have the funding necessary to pay for upstream for RK3328 because it is far behind.
@loverpi said:
RK3328 will probably be the last one to get video acceleration let alone video acceleration in chrome. The first platform to get acceleration is S905X. The second is H3/H5. Libre Computer is paying for the work to upstream those. Rockchip isn't investing much in RK3328. HDMI doesn't even work in mainline right now. Libre Computer doesn't have the funding necessary to pay for upstream for RK3328 because it is far behind.
Gee, I wish I had known that before investing in the Kickstarter. Is there ANY timeframe from RockChip at all?? Like, within the year?
That being said, what's the Alternate board?
Is there one with 4GB RAM and USB3? you can recommend for graphical updates so I don't waste my money / time again?
I am willing to re-purchase to get good usage in Linux with hardware decoding.
Whether Chrome will even receive V4L2 support is something that only Google can answer. Per this page: https://libre.computer/products/boards/, it indicates which ones are the most capable. There are no boards with 4GB, USB 3.0, and good open source support at this point.
@loverpi said:
Whether Chrome will even receive V4L2 support is something that only Google can answer. Per this page: https://libre.computer/products/boards/, it indicates which ones are the most capable. There are no boards with 4GB, USB 3.0, and good open source support at this point.
Why even make this product then. I mean come on! how is this good enough.
You go to the trouble of a Kickstarted to get it made, you choose RockChip (God knows why) and then it's all to hard and you just say, well you bought it, no go talk to RockChip?" Seriously, is that any way to run support or a buisness?
Not having a go at you personally however, on a whole, that's the difinitive of garbage support.
Who the hell sells a car and then says, go contact the engine manufacturer about the perfomance.
If you buy a German drill but the motor is made in China, you don't tell the customer to go contact China for their drill not perfoming propperly.
Why bother even making it in the first place if it's not going to be supported by the people that made the SoC in the first place? That's insanity.
And to top it off, there's no alternative?
Honestly, if you knew, before buying it, would you support a product in that state?
Would you buy it if you knew?
I hope it changes however, I feel as though I have wasted my money and my time trying to get something to work properly, that no one, not even the people who sold it to me, are interested in.
I hope the situation changes however, that's crap support. (Blame RockChip. That's insane, you people made it choosing RockChip!)
You are barking up the wrong tree. Chromium doesn't support V4L2. It's not the product's responsibility to fix every piece of open source software that exists in the world. The board already supports decoding all of the formats.
Instead of complaining, how about you work on Chromium bits necessary? That's how open source works, you get everything everyone else did for free. Having a crap mentality because you didn't bother to figure the basics out is not an excuse.
Not having a go at you personally however, on a whole, that's the difinitive of garbage support. Who the hell sells a car and then says, go contact the engine manufacturer about the perfomance. If you buy a German drill but the motor is made in China, you don't tell the customer to go contact China for their drill not perfoming propperly.
You are asking about pieces we didn't sell. You purchased a board, not software, consulting, and support. Those came free because of work a lot of people contributed to. A good analogy is you purchased a screwdriver and are asking why it can't build a house. You didn't buy a house.
Why bother even making it in the first place if it's not going to be supported by the people that made the SoC in the first place? That's insanity. And to top it off, there's no alternative?
This is the same tired and useless rant of people who have not contributed to open source before. You can buy a x86 PC for $500 but you didn't choose it.
Honestly, if you knew, before buying it, would you support a product in that state? Would you buy it if you knew?
Everything advertised works.
I hope it changes however, I feel as though I have wasted my money and my time trying to get something to work properly, that no one, not even the people who sold it to me, are interested in.
We didn't sell you software.
I hope the situation changes however, that's crap support. (Blame RockChip. That's insane, you people made it choosing RockChip!)
@loverpi said:
You are barking up the wrong tree. Chromium doesn't support V4L2. It's not the product's responsibility to fix every piece of open source software that exists in the world. The board already supports decoding all of the formats.
Instead of complaining, how about you work on Chromium bits necessary? That's how open source works, you get everything everyone else did for free. Having a crap mentality because you didn't bother to figure the basics out is not an excuse.
Here you are telling me it's my fault for not knowing the basics! man. Hope someone at your company reads this.
If it's so basic, why is it not in the image already? Come on, Mr.Basics, you can't even deliver it when purchased? on the image, it ships with? Wasn't the board developed and sold and advertised to do it? "Oh, you have to wait for Ubuntu 18.04 before that stuff happens" we got told. Well, Ubuntu 18 is here, it's still not working. You seem to be telling us "Customers" it never will because we are too basic now? So, it's for experienced Programmers with
Basics, my left butt cheek. I don't program, I bought it to learn Linux with. something it struggles at. That's how it was sold to me on the Kickstarter.
You are asking about pieces we didn't sell. You purchased a board, not software, consulting, and support. Those came free because of work a lot of people contributed to. A good analogy is you purchased a screwdriver and are asking why it can't build a house. You didn't buy a house.
What the heck are you saying? I know I didn't buy a house.
The screwdriver isn't working as advertised! It said it would do so many different things and yet I can't even build an Ikea chair with it let alone a house. That's more accurate.
There, I fixed your "faulty screwdriver" analogy.
This is the same tired and useless rant of people who have not contributed to open source before. You can buy a x86 PC for $500 but you didn't choose it.
Next time, I will just get a Raspberry Pi because, it at least has support and , well, costs about the same.
Why do you think I was interested in the first place. Pi Killer my left foot.
Honestly, if you knew, before buying it, would you support a product in that state? Would you buy it if you knew?
Everything advertised works.
No under Linux. Only under an Android image. Yet, it was advertised as both.
So, realistically, it's at least, DECEPTIVE.
I hope it changes, however, I feel as though I have wasted my money and my time trying to get something to work properly, that no one, not even the people who sold it to me, are interested in.
We didn't sell you software.
No, you didn't. What you did do is sold me unsupported Linux hardware, with no intention of delivering on it and then went back and pushed the blame to others.
Now you're pushing it to users themselves instead of doing something productive about it.
What kind of business blames the customers ;-) Great job!!
I'm sure you will run a fortune 500 really soon, I doubt there are many feeling "left-out" on the forums right now. (That was sarcasm)
Useless rant.
Pathetic support. Now you just try to shame the customer base that complains at being LET DOWN by you.
The only useless thing here is not doing enough to improve the situation.
Crappy effort. You should be ashamed.
Yeah, I'm frustrated. You're taking feedback as a joke and trying to deflect it to RockChip and when that doesn't take, you push back at you're own customers. Now, that, right there, is just crap.
For a start-up, you really know how to "drop the ball" don't you.
You are entitled to your opinion. You are also getting multiple organizations confused. We are not a startup.
This is a technical forum for technical items. If you have nothing but rants, please don't bother posting here. Don't call people d**ks. It's unwarranted.
Raspberry Pi does not have video accelerated Chromium either so you are confused and have no idea what you are talking about. The OpenMAX system used by Raspberry Pi for decoding is even less likely to be supported by Chromium.
It's not just about chromium, it's about the lack of support for the hardware in Linux with this chipset. I'm not the only one frustrated here and to be told to go talk to RockChip as a solution is just nuts, or blame it on us users? Maybe I am getting multiple organizations confused, however, none of them seem willing to support this product. It's just tough luck for us customers for buying it seems.
No one but you started inferring to people as "basic" and I certainly haven't called you a d**ck.
Thanks for sharing where you stand on support.
Least all of us now know where we stand so, thank you for clearing that up at least.
Whatever.
Rant over.
Comments
I spent a few hours trying to get hw accel working:
https://github.com/rockchip-linux/mpp
Installed correctly.
http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Mpp
gstreamer with ubuntu 16.04 is 1.8 and this requires 1.12 or greater so it was a bust. I tried compiling gstreamer from source but wasn't able to figure out how to install it without breaking all the packages already installed. I think the best solution is to just wait for a 18.04 distro to be released. From what I can tell, this will allow for the elusive hardware acceleration. Seems pretty achievable - ie already done.
Yea. This is basically what I found too but firefly will have a huge task getting ubuntu 18.04 to work. They modified xorg to include HW acceleration. There is a huge reason why no one should do this. If the underlying code changes, integrating changes from a project as complex as xorg can be quite a challenge.
I actually managed to get GStreamer 1.14 building but it didn't help. The libdrm and the libmali drivers didn't work properly for this board. I think you are right about the rpi 4. GStreamer is a very complicated application and they actually recommend not building it from scratch as it is too difficult for most people. You might be able to get it to build but it took me a few hours and I still missed dependencies. It really requires a dedicated build box, possibly only for building GStreamer, like in a VM.
What I would really hope is that firefly can get a default xorg working, link up their drm and mali drivers, submit them to the upstream kernel team, and shove all graphics onto the hardware.
It also looks like that firefly put out a newer chip faster than they could come up with the software to make it work, which is a shame. I understand the desire to put out something incredible before other people but they hurt themselves by not having video work. I also think they made a huge mistake selling this as having native 4k support or even 1080p while obviously not. The fact that a developer got a stream to work using h265 for a test stream in a demo does not mean VLC or GStreamer will playback video. If firefly was very smart, they would drop GStreamer and focus on porting omxplayer to make the transition easier from a raspberry pi.
As I offered before, if firefly would like help getting the drm and mali stuff working, please create a git readme and a set of bug fixes and a set of tasks, put it up online, and allow the community to hack on it for a while. I am more than happy to help develop for this board but I would need a place to start.
@bholland firefly posted this a few days ago, The kernel code of Firefly ROC-RK3328-CC has been officially approved by kernel.org. The related BSP support has been added to Linux Kernel 4.17 version.
You can download the code directly from the kernel.org official website, use the configuration of Linux kernel to compile ROC-RK3328-CC, to get the native Linux operating system.
i'm not a dev so don't know if this is a step forward, firefly posted another 16.04 build
that's hard to download and doesn't boot I wish they would post what changes are when they post new builds,
@bholland Most of the work can only be done by Rockchip. Linux video pipeline is incredibly immature for ARM based systems. It doesn't even work reliably on x86 systems and is usually masked by good CPU software decoders. There's multiple competing APIs and browsers like Chromium and Firefox don't bother to support hardware video acceleration on Linux due to the lack of clarity. You have V4L2 M2M, VAAPI, VDPAU, and numerous proprietary APIs for specific chips. It not as straight forward and easy.
Haha thank you loverpi. I've known this for awhile but it's refreshing to remind Linux noobs of this. Look guys, it's open source software that is built but volunteers mostly. So it's vital for people to roll up their sleeves and help code and stop bitching so much about what does or doesn't work perfectly for them. If you can't help then just deal with it, it's free software after all. It's not like you had to buy a copy like windows.
And I work mostly with BSD on my other machines and in the BSD world, when something doesn't work the way you want it, you get some smarts and fix it yourself. Half these guys probably can't figure out the command line or how to use a terminal. Oh and btw i got the 4/04 ubuntu image working perfectly fine with tear-free video, smooth graphics, music and some* video games. So you all suck at computing.
Hey Freedman, some of us don't code and can still use the command line.
Not everyone is a programmer and can't contribute in that way.
If you have a working image, why not share it with the rest of us noobs instead of being kind of a d#@k about it.
Just because we buy a computer offered to work with advertised specs and it doesn't perform doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't complain. Sure the OS is free but it's not doing as advertized and we all understand we need to wait for someone smarter than most of us who understands how the hardware works and can code to do the work.
I personally check here almost every day for the hope someone figured it out and can give step by step instructions, maybe with explinations so we can all "get smarter" on how things work and why you use certain command lines (What they do)
To ask someone with no programming ability to just go get smarts and just "work it out" is counter productive and frankly, unreasonable.
It would take many years of study to gain these skills from scratch, especially on your own with a handful of unhelpful people telling you you're a noob and too stupid.
How about helping the community out if you're so smart. I'm sure loverpi and the other FireFly members would appreciate the help so they don't have to work it out and can just release the image.
What a crap thing to say. Seriously, lift your game.
Oh no, I used the regular image, I just know how to fine-tune linux to do whatever I want it to. Did you even look under the hood to see what you could do? When was the last time you even read a man page? Have you gone on the Ubuntu wiki, Debian wiki or Arch wiki and read any articles or guides for lightweight window manager/speed/optimization/power consumption? Did you know it works much better if you plug it into a regular computer monitor and not a flatscreen TV because the high resolution is heavier on the CPU/GPU? I did share some basic things in my retro-gamers post. But it sounds like I stuck a nerve with you so if the shoe fits wear it ;-) My game is lifted, my board works and yours apparently doesn't. Don't blame the machine it's the user. And yes, it does take time to learn, but isn't that why we bought SOC boards w/ a next gen chip in the first place? I'm confused about your stance here. I sure Best Buy has plenty of HP laptops with Windows 10 that would be better suited for you.
That's what I thought.
You're all talk and actually have nothing useful at all to actually offer the community.
That wasn't a hard guess though, honestly ;-)
It looks as though someone didn't read themselves, did they.
The topic, is about hardware acceleration for video playback in browsers and media players.
The video hardware is not properly implemented yet for assisted decodes, only you seem to be able to get it going it seems. This topic has everything to do with high resoulution and 4k decodes.
Your game is far, far from lifted because, you're just not a very good human yet.
Go work on your people skills.
Uh, that is strange because video decoding does work, it's just an code immature sub-system like the dev said. But my point was that you can help code to fix the DRM stack and/or you can improve performance including video performance based on your system administration and tuning. This is why we use Linux or BSD in the first place, the near infinite tuning options in our software that doesn't exist in non-free OS's like Android, Windows or OSX. My wife says I need to be nicer to people, so I'll put it on my list to post a guide on how to fine-tune the lastest image (probably the debian 5/28) into a speed machine that's basically as fast as a laptop, for the most part (I know the current state of rockchip linux is imperfect and incomplete and I'm totally aware of that). It will be a suckless tools setup too, it's perfect for that board.
Your wife sounds like a very smart woman.
This is exactly why Linus states why Linux has failed to break into the mainstream.
People do it for themselves, get it half working and no one benifits except them.
Some of us are not programmers.
We don't have the hardware specs and years to train our minds on understanding the code required.
We come to forums for help and instruction to learn and fix our issues, then we meet someone like you and that's why these computers never take off and its "off to best buy."
Ok, that's a bit harsh, but it sure puts a bump in the road of learning.
I appolgise somewhat however, all you did was jump in and belittle eveyone here in the most inconstructive way, calling them stupid, work it out for yourself, read a man page and you'll get it working, I mean really? you think the people who designed this computer didn't do that themselves with more knowlege than most of us?
As you said, there are substantial improvments to be made in the code subsystem/api to get the GPU working properly. If you're so damm good, teach us!
Offer guides, show us how to do the things to get the computer out and away from windows 10 and best buy.
Contribute to humnanity and Linux in general.
A man page a day is not going to make this issue go away.
You sound as though you could contribute so, contribute!
FireFly sure could use the help and after your last letter, maybe there is hope for someone like youreself as a person too. Even becoming a really useful mentor to people and who knows, making the entire race smarter in at least this instance.
Okay okay, you've warmed my cold heart. I'm sorry, at first I was only teasing and that guy took it so personally that I turned up the heat on him unnecessarily. You are all right, I do have shitty social skills (that's why I love computers). And I'm a line cook, in a industry of assholes, so I come off as one too easily. Once again I apologize, the last thing I would ever want to do is take away from or disparage this community, give me a month and I'll post some guides (sorry busy schedule and I want to make sure I give you guys some quality stuff). My wife wants me to do a youtube channel where I teach people how to build lightweight linux/bsd systems and make them highly functional. The only problem is when people make mistakes based on information from me (i give guidelines but I'm no replacement for official docs) and they go to complain to to devs or forums, usually the hatred will be thrown back at me cause I making users lazy by giving them a cheap alternative to actually doing their homework and reading the documentation. Post a problem and say I followed xyz in freedman's youtube video and watch fire and pitchforks rise. You be surprised by some of the BSD/Arch Linux forums, those old unix-beards are grumps and they very little patience for noobs. So I have to find a balance to make it please both sides somehow.
That begs another question if the ROC-3328-CC can handle ffmpeg screencasting without the video being too choppy, I could do live videos from the device.
Well, far out. Your job sounds horrible.
Maybe you could make money doing your Youtube guides idea and get out of that line cook stuff.
That's not what humanity should be about. That area obviously needs severe improvment by a lot of us (humanity).
I'm really, really glad I warmed your heart. The world is shit enough (as you have clearly illustrated)
Less noob, more Linux. I'm looking forward to that. No more Windows, no more best buy.
Yep, i'm good with that.
The latest images with LXDE and Android both have hardware accelerated video and 3D working properly. However, it doesn't work on all apps since most apps don't support gstreamer directly.
Unfortunately I had to jump ship for a platform that would do the job I needed. The rock64 board has hardware decoding working and can stream 1080p flawlessly. I don't have any 4k screens to test it with, but I'm told it works fine. I think part of the problem here is the old linux images, but I haven't built a linux kernel in over 20 years, so I'm of no use.
Fantastic news. I will have a look. Is this the Armbian image? Android is not going to work for me, it's too unfriendly and locked down. I need Ubuntu Linux for daily use.
*edit nevermind, i'll download and try out whatever is there.
Freedman, send us your YouTube link (When you are ready) I'll subscribe for sure.
I obviously have a lot of Linux to learn. ;-)
I installed the new ROC-RK3328-CC-ubuntu18.04-LXDE_20180605
It is installed and working however, the included Chrome browser acceleration seems stuck in low-resolution and CPU at 100% on all 4 cores running 720 or above. I am yet to try firefox as it's not yet installed so I guess, not gstreamer compatible?
I guess i'll have to wait for ffmpeg to be added to compatibility. This is what I have seen on Google posts about Chrome thus far.
My next step is to move over to BTRFS from ext4 as everything I am reading, it causes less wear on flash drives than the journaling versions like ext4 and it also uses crc checking on files which would be good to track any corruption.
I'm still noobish so, we will see how far I get.
@loverpi
What player uses gstreamer?
I am trying 4k content and 1080p video from sampler sites in VLC and clearly, that doesn't support it.
I then tried Videos/Totem and Parole (Which are based on gstreamer according to the software packager and google) and these also failed to playback fluently.
Is there something I am missing?
I don't suppose there is a recommended desktop manager for
Armbian_5.46_Roc-rk3328-cc_Ubuntu_xenial_defaul..> 31-May-2018 02:53 is there?
The http://www.mediafire.com/folder/gamc1a392s3mb/Ubuntu page is down. Actually, all the image links are down.
Hello everybody and many, many thanks to @shades_aus for this thread and his comments: I find myself in almost the exact same situation and I found his comments and shares very useful.
Now, has anybody tried the new "rk3328-roc-cc_ubuntu18.04_lxde_20180717.tgz" available here http://share.loverpi.com/board/libre-computer-project/libre-computer-board-roc-rk3328-cc/image/ubuntu/ ?
Or is it better the "ROC-RK3328-CC_Ubuntu18.04_LXDE_20180717.img.xz" available here: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/gamc1a392s3mb/Ubuntu ? BTW, I noticed that there's no md5sum for such a file (as opposed to the other two images at the same path). But more important: what's the difference between this 20180717 image w.r.t. the 20180605 one? And what's the difference between the tgz and the img.xz files?
(I'm asking while downloading both of them...)
@loverpi just curious if there are any newer details, or a more certain timetable available? It looks like quite a few people are interested (based on the view-count this is the third most popular post in the ROC-RK3328-CC category), and I'd count myself as part of that number. Any information you can provide is much appreciated.
RK3328 will probably be the last one to get video acceleration let alone video acceleration in chrome. The first platform to get acceleration is S905X. The second is H3/H5. Libre Computer is paying for the work to upstream those. Rockchip isn't investing much in RK3328. HDMI doesn't even work in mainline right now. Libre Computer doesn't have the funding necessary to pay for upstream for RK3328 because it is far behind.
Gee, I wish I had known that before investing in the Kickstarter. Is there ANY timeframe from RockChip at all?? Like, within the year?
That being said, what's the Alternate board?
Is there one with 4GB RAM and USB3? you can recommend for graphical updates so I don't waste my money / time again?
I am willing to re-purchase to get good usage in Linux with hardware decoding.
Whether Chrome will even receive V4L2 support is something that only Google can answer. Per this page: https://libre.computer/products/boards/, it indicates which ones are the most capable. There are no boards with 4GB, USB 3.0, and good open source support at this point.
Why even make this product then. I mean come on! how is this good enough.
You go to the trouble of a Kickstarted to get it made, you choose RockChip (God knows why) and then it's all to hard and you just say, well you bought it, no go talk to RockChip?" Seriously, is that any way to run support or a buisness?
Not having a go at you personally however, on a whole, that's the difinitive of garbage support.
Who the hell sells a car and then says, go contact the engine manufacturer about the perfomance.
If you buy a German drill but the motor is made in China, you don't tell the customer to go contact China for their drill not perfoming propperly.
Why bother even making it in the first place if it's not going to be supported by the people that made the SoC in the first place? That's insanity.
And to top it off, there's no alternative?
Honestly, if you knew, before buying it, would you support a product in that state?
Would you buy it if you knew?
I hope it changes however, I feel as though I have wasted my money and my time trying to get something to work properly, that no one, not even the people who sold it to me, are interested in.
I hope the situation changes however, that's crap support. (Blame RockChip. That's insane, you people made it choosing RockChip!)
You are barking up the wrong tree. Chromium doesn't support V4L2. It's not the product's responsibility to fix every piece of open source software that exists in the world. The board already supports decoding all of the formats.
Instead of complaining, how about you work on Chromium bits necessary? That's how open source works, you get everything everyone else did for free. Having a crap mentality because you didn't bother to figure the basics out is not an excuse.
You are asking about pieces we didn't sell. You purchased a board, not software, consulting, and support. Those came free because of work a lot of people contributed to. A good analogy is you purchased a screwdriver and are asking why it can't build a house. You didn't buy a house.
This is the same tired and useless rant of people who have not contributed to open source before. You can buy a x86 PC for $500 but you didn't choose it.
Everything advertised works.
We didn't sell you software.
Useless rant.
Here you are telling me it's my fault for not knowing the basics! man. Hope someone at your company reads this.
If it's so basic, why is it not in the image already? Come on, Mr.Basics, you can't even deliver it when purchased? on the image, it ships with? Wasn't the board developed and sold and advertised to do it? "Oh, you have to wait for Ubuntu 18.04 before that stuff happens" we got told. Well, Ubuntu 18 is here, it's still not working. You seem to be telling us "Customers" it never will because we are too basic now? So, it's for experienced Programmers with
Basics, my left butt cheek. I don't program, I bought it to learn Linux with. something it struggles at. That's how it was sold to me on the Kickstarter.
What the heck are you saying? I know I didn't buy a house.
The screwdriver isn't working as advertised! It said it would do so many different things and yet I can't even build an Ikea chair with it let alone a house. That's more accurate.
There, I fixed your "faulty screwdriver" analogy.
Next time, I will just get a Raspberry Pi because, it at least has support and , well, costs about the same.
Why do you think I was interested in the first place. Pi Killer my left foot.
No under Linux. Only under an Android image. Yet, it was advertised as both.
So, realistically, it's at least, DECEPTIVE.
No, you didn't. What you did do is sold me unsupported Linux hardware, with no intention of delivering on it and then went back and pushed the blame to others.
Now you're pushing it to users themselves instead of doing something productive about it.
What kind of business blames the customers ;-) Great job!!
I'm sure you will run a fortune 500 really soon, I doubt there are many feeling "left-out" on the forums right now. (That was sarcasm)
Pathetic support. Now you just try to shame the customer base that complains at being LET DOWN by you.
The only useless thing here is not doing enough to improve the situation.
Crappy effort. You should be ashamed.
Yeah, I'm frustrated. You're taking feedback as a joke and trying to deflect it to RockChip and when that doesn't take, you push back at you're own customers. Now, that, right there, is just crap.
For a start-up, you really know how to "drop the ball" don't you.
You are entitled to your opinion. You are also getting multiple organizations confused. We are not a startup.
This is a technical forum for technical items. If you have nothing but rants, please don't bother posting here. Don't call people d**ks. It's unwarranted.
Raspberry Pi does not have video accelerated Chromium either so you are confused and have no idea what you are talking about. The OpenMAX system used by Raspberry Pi for decoding is even less likely to be supported by Chromium.
It's not just about chromium, it's about the lack of support for the hardware in Linux with this chipset. I'm not the only one frustrated here and to be told to go talk to RockChip as a solution is just nuts, or blame it on us users? Maybe I am getting multiple organizations confused, however, none of them seem willing to support this product. It's just tough luck for us customers for buying it seems.
No one but you started inferring to people as "basic" and I certainly haven't called you a d**ck.
Thanks for sharing where you stand on support.
Least all of us now know where we stand so, thank you for clearing that up at least.
Whatever.
Rant over.