Early community images for H3, H6 and A64

1st Official Post
    • Official Post

    This topic is superseded by new one!

    Hello everyone,

    after a lot of work, which isn't finished by far, I can present you first, somehow usable, images.

    IMAGES:

    Images for following boards are available here:

    H3 based boards:

    - BananaPi M2+

    - Beelink X2

    - Libretech ALL-H3-CC (Tritium) (H3 SoC)

    - OrangePi 2

    - OrangePi PC

    - OrangePi PC Plus

    - OrangePi Plus/Plus 2 (same image for both boards)

    - OrangePi Plus 2E

    Boards with less than 1 GiB of RAM are not supported!

    A64 based boards:

    - OrangePi Win

    - Pine64

    - Pine64 LTS

    - Pine64 Plus

    H6 based boards:

    - Pine H64

    IMAGE UPDATES:

    Once you prepared base image, take the latest update for your SoC here. It works with any board. Just grab the latest by the date. It would be too much work and it would take too much space if I would upload fresh image for each board each time.

    If you have different, unsupported board, drop a message here. I'm interested what are the most popular boards. TV boxes are not supported, except Beelink X2.

    FEATURES:

    - mainline kernel & U-Boot

    - completely open source except GPU (Mali) driver (until Lima project is good enough for Kodi)

    - latest Kodi

    - zero copy decoding & rendering

    - shared decoding & rendering code with other SoCs (with small adjustement for now)

    - compared to OpenELEC images with BSP kernel, HDMI should work with any monitor automatically

    - HDMI CEC

    - multi channel HDMI audio (correct audio output must be selected)

    - IR receiver

    - Analog audio (except H6)

    LIMITATIONS:

    - only H3, H6 and A64 SoCs are supported for now

    - only MPEG2, H264 and H265 (HEVC) codecs are supported in hardware, for now. Others are software decoded.

    - 10 bit videos are not supported (hardware limitation)

    • MPEG2 should work well
    • H265 works in general, with some videos not properly decoded
    • H264 works in general, with some videos not properly decoded

    - deinterlacing is not yet implemented (combing is visible)

    - OrangePi onboard wifi chips are not supported (RTL8189ETV and RTL8189FTV)

    - sleep is not implemented

    - no eMMC install script, but it should be easy to port it from old OpenELEC images

    - no support for TV out

    - no temperature sensor for SoC, so it may get a bit hot (driver is WIP)

    - HDMI audio passthrough doesn't work yet (it might in some cases)

    Plan for the future:

    As you can see, most limitations are kernel related. Some of those limitations are already worked upon and I will probably add patches soon after they are posted and work well enough. Others limitations, like drivers for RTL8189ETV and RTL8189FTV are unlikely to being resolved anytime soon, if ever. They are pain to maintain and are not compatible with iwd.

    Code repositories:

    allwinner branch on LE github: GitHub - LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv at allwinner (official branch for AW SoCs)

    hw_dec_ffmpeg branch on my github: GitHub - jernejsk/LibreELEC.tv at hw_dec_ffmpeg (same as above with work in progress, source for images linked here)

    I also accept suggestion which drivers should be enabled in kernel config and which boards should be added. Support for other SoCs is planned to be added later, when kernel support is good enough and appropriate GPU driver is available.

    Thanks to all who helped with this in any way.

    Check release notes provided by jernej in OP. Everything is there :


    Currently, only H3 SoC is supported

    And

    only MPEG2, H264 and H265 (HEVC) codecs are supported in hardware, for now. Others are software decoded

    Quote from jernej

    As said in OP, only H3 is supported. Actually, A20 should be easy to add, but I don't have any such board, so somebody else should add needed bits.

    Yes, the main difference is only 4 items to consider.

    H3 Quad-core Cortex-A7 1.6GHz vs. A20 Dual-Core Cortex-A7 1GHz

    H3 TF card (Max. 32GB) / MMC card slot, No Sata vs. A20 SD (Max. 64GB) / MMC card slot ; SATA upto 2TB on 2.5" disk

    H3 10/100M Ethernet RJ45 vs. A20 10/100/1000M Ethernet

    H3 Realtek RTL8189ETV, IEEE 802.11 b/g/n vs. A20 No WiFi

    I think Sata and Ethernet is the major ones.

    So, i tried it yesterday on Orange Pi PC. It do works, but... Add-ons practicaly unusabe - some of them do not even want to install. I was able to install Elementum only. Tried to play video,it plays, have a lot of artefacts. But, any way its great, will work for further images. Its support 1360*768, and heats CPU much lower comparing to KODI+MPV from Retroorangepi.

    • Official Post
    Quote from kulich

    Please OrangePi One

    Added.

    Quote from mega-samu

    I have a beelink x2 (http://linux-sunxi.org/beelink_x2), would it be possible to make an image for this?

    I'll prepare image for that, but TV boxes are usually unsupported category here. Beelink X2 may be an exception, because it is supported by mainline kernel.

    Quote from cmd42

    Orange Pi Plus2 pls?

    If I remember correctly, the only difference between Plus and Plus 2 is the amount of RAM. That means you can easily use image for Plus. However, please note that there might be (bigger than already) issues due to extra RAM (some calculations). Nothing that can't be easily fixed, but I have to test that first.