Your experience with the board?

dmt0

Hi all!

I'm thinking whether to buy this board to use as my media PC. How was your experience using it this way?

• Were there issues running popular media player apps - VLC, mplayer, Kodi?
• Are USB issues resolved?
• Is USB giving enough juice to power an HDD?
• Can you connect an external sound card? I have an oldish creative Sound Blaster XFi, which works ok on desktop Linux
• Can you connect an external WiFi (TP-Link, not sure about the chip - works ok on Linux too)

Any suggestions and notes about your general experience would be appreciated!

JohnL

You'll want LibreElec or Station OS. To date I can find no instructions to install station OS or the multiboot tool. I've been looking on and off for 6 months. I have both images but cannot get them to boot. Etcher says there is no partition info. You must need to format the SD card then copy the image to it manually? Wish there were directions! I'm using Armbian x64 booted from USB 3.0 HD dock/hub. No working Kodi yet in x64 Armbian. Video is choppy when using the player. If I recall correctly Debian9 played video well

JohnL

I rarely use the board. I won't use Chromium. Until Vivaldi comes out with x64 ARM, it does not meet my browsing needs. Kodi isn't working so it does not meet my multi media needs. It's something I update once a month or so and then turn off. I use my PIs or laptop for everything it won't do yet. Cant wait until I can use it. Love the USB 3.0 boot in Armbian . You can add Armbian config to any Debian based OS. Github has directions.

jpegxguy

The firefly images aren't very god but I've seen people succeding with LibreELEC and Android. Personally I tried Armbian (very good) and then moved to my favorite with is Arch, but with the rockchip 4.4 kernel from the armbian guys. Works nicely!

uudruid74

I've had no problems getting Station running.  It's running Kodi (with full 4K/HDR but still not getting surround), HBO Now, Tubi, iHeart Radio, Audial (best radio app ever), and Chrome (used to connect to apkmirror and my phone to sideload apps).  Kodi 18.2 runs but doesn't have the HDR mods.  It runs better than the packaged 16 version, but .. you don't get HDR.  Then again, most of my files aren't HDR.  I'm still deciding which to use.  Hopefully I can get the backup running soon.

I've even run an update to 3.0 / release 15 of Station OS from their website, but release 16 didn't have an actual update file ... seems they don't test before posting.

I hope to root it soon and add Magisk and Viper Audio.

loverpi

• Were there issues running popular media player apps - VLC, mplayer, Kodi?
  RK3328 is not as well supported as S905X. Some apps require special versions rather than the default releases. I'm talking about Android. In Linux, it's a mess and I wouldn't spend too much time trying.
• Are USB issues resolved?
  Depends on the kernel you use. It is a software issue.
• Is USB giving enough juice to power an HDD?
  Never power a HDD from a board powered from MicroUSB. Just don't do it. If it does work, it can cause other issues. Use a powered hub always.

uudruid74

Just a note.  By HDD do you mean a laptop drive??  It could work, but don't.  If you mean SSD, that makes more sense, but I actually use an SSD to USB 3.1 adapter that has a built-in hub with additional USB ports, its own power supply, and a multi-format storage card reader.  Use something similar.

Derron

VLC crashes due to multiple reasons including problems with pre-loading of MKV files, corrupted program components, or compatibility issues with your system. All this I encountered while using VLC. For example, in my case, as it turned out, the problem was not in VLC but in my laptop. I couldn't figure out what the reason was for a long time, but when I bought a Dell XPS and installed VLC, everything worked fine. I still don't understand what the problem was, but I think the problem was with my old laptop.